The Father of Food Preservation

It Works, but Why?

Appert apparently did not fully grasp why his approach worked. It would take another 54 years until Louis Pasteur, who started working with microbes, understood why Appert’s approach, which hermetically sealed the bottle, worked, Dr. Marcy explained. Appert’s lack of a scientific background meant his discovery was part luck, part persistence. “He did two things that set him aside,” said Dr. Marcy. “He was scrupulously clean, and he took meticulous notes.” The endorsement of the French Navy was also a big plus.

Appert realized that heat treatment alone was insufficient, Dr. Marcy said, but that food in glass jars with the opening sealed by a waxed cork stopper that had been jammed in, then boiled in water at 212°F for hours, worked. “He got lucky that this worked,” said Dr. Marcy. “There were some heat-resistant microorganisms that he didn’t encounter. He also was lucky that the French Navy demonstrated it.”

He believes that Appert wasn’t working totally from scratch. The idea of preservation by heat was known. There are also historical references to preservation of juice by mild heat treatments, a process now known as “hot filling.” This method was known in Roman times, although the Romans did not have hermetically sealed containers. But Appert could have known of hermetic sealing using water to tighten the lid to the jar for preserving kimchee and sauerkraut in crockery.

In 1860, it was discovered that calcium chloride could raise the temperature of boiling water more than 28°F, which speeded the canning process and made it safer. Canning came to the United States in 1819 but didn’t become popular until the Civil War, experiencing a later boom during the two world wars.

A Modest Beginning

Little is known about Appert’s personal life except that he was born in the parish of St. Loup in Chalons-sur-Marne in 1749 and died in 1841. On his birth certificate, his father Claude was described as a woolcomber, though some accounts say he was a hotelkeeper, as J.C. Graham, chief medical officer of H.J. Heinz Co. Ltd., noted in the May 1981 issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. According to Graham, Appert was originally an apprentice cook at the Palais-Royal Hotel in Chalon and then became steward to the Duke and Duchess of Deux-Ponts. He was known to have experimented with food his whole life, working in distilling and brewing, grocers’ storehouses, kitchens, and wine cellars before becoming a confectioner in Paris in 1780. He left that profession in 1796 to focus on devising his preservation method.

Appert came from a long line of farmers and innkeepers, according to “Science and Its Times,” by Neil Schlager, which said that as a boy Appert learned to cook and to cork champagne bottles. In 1784, he used an inheritance to open a candy and grocery shop in Paris. He married Elisabeth Benoist and had five children. As his grocery business grew, he started experimenting with preserving food beyond the harvest season and is said to have used champagne bottles early on because they were thick enough to withstand the pressure of bubbles. According to Schlager, Appert hypothesized that “heat destroys or at least neutralizes the fermentation that changes the quality of animal and vegetable substances.”

By 1802, according to Schlager, Appert had moved to a large property in Massy, outside Paris, where he could combine a farm and a factory so that the food to be preserved was closer to where it was grown. There, he experimented with meat, dairy, fruits, and vegetables. He had enough space to wash and rinse, label, and package jars, along with a lab to test new products. In the early 1800s, he traveled to port cities in France and asked naval authorities to test his preserved meats and vegetables. He already had experience with various foodstuffs before taking samples to the government and subsequently winning the prize. Despite his success with canning, he struggled throughout his life because of high equipment costs and at one time lost his factory and had to rebuild. He retired in 1836 and is said to have died a pauper at age 91.