Tupperware: How the plastic containers conquered the world

We lift the lid on the iconic brand of containers that have transformed leftovers, fridges and cupboards forever

Hosting a Tupperware party, as illustrated here in the 1950s, brought women at least part ways out of the kitchen.

With single-use plastic recently ripped from the produce in our supermarkets, and a revolting raft of drinking bottles and other malleable rubbish choking our oceans — it’s easy to forget just how exciting innovative plastics were in the mid’ 20th century. During the pandemic, the share price of one old favourite, polyethylene, has tripled. 

Tupperware was developed by the delightfully named Earl Silas Tupper (1907–1983) a Massachusetts native. It took him eight years to bring his bell-shaped, pliable, lidded storage boxes effectively to market in 1946 through the ingenious mechanism of sale-through-presentation at-home parties.

The plastic containers are commonplace in almost every home in the world.

Tupperware Home Parties (or THP), was a technique pioneered by Stanley Home Products, which has persisted with a number of leading brands to this day. Initially, buyers across the country were confused by the plastic food boxes. The material was familiar on the war front in military and commercial applications, but a peculiarity to families who had grown up with tin, wood and glass containers.

Brownie Wise (seriously where do they come up with these names) became head of marketing of Tupperware in 1951. A beautiful divorcee and single parent, Brownie had not even completed high school, but became wildly successful selling Tupperware in Florida and was recruited in by Tupper, to apply her ideas. A charismatic leader, she would go on to develop the company’s legendary corporate culture of THP, becoming the first woman to appear on the cover of the American trade magazine, Business Week in 1954.

Brownie Wise (1913 1932), the First Lady of Tupperware from 1951 to the year of her unceremonious firing in 1958. Image: Tupperware

She had no formal contract with Tupperware — leaving her vulnerable at a time when women could only hope to polish the glass ceiling. With her platinum do, Hollywood looks and grip on the popular imagination for her dealers, Brownie Wise was the scarlet lipped, Marcel waved poster girl of Tupperware marketing,

Brand loyalty and the personal-development contingent of selling Tupperware at a Poly-T Party, was dished out to interested recruits, tying the idea of happy home, happy life, happy career in one chrome belted bundle. Tupperware parties had a cosy, home-spun quality engaging with current American family values that hit all the right notes.

Newsletters encouraged proven, elegant, selling techniques and an essential positive thinking to oil that sale for the Ice-Tup popsicle holders and Party Susan. If you hosted an event in your home, your local dealer was there as the stage manager, throwing fairy-dust from the side-lines. The highly personal printed invitation encouraged all-comers to - “bring a friend”. The home surroundings became, for the length of the party, the shop floor. Sellers charged retail prices, pocketing the profit they made on wholesale prices from the company.

Tupperware parties had a cosy, homespun quality engaging with current American family values that hit all the right notes.

Tupperware sales, with a nationwide PR push on all media fronts, offered women of a still highly restricted, post-war generation a comfortable escape from their particular domestic box with a means to raise their own salary. They could for a time, be unapologetic, amateur stars in their own suburb, developing trust in a cutting-edge, attractive, practical product.

Dealers were encouraged into theatrical stunts like tossing a Tupperware Wonder Bowl filled with staining grape juice across the patio at the hostess’s home. The lids had to be ‘burped’ to ensure a seal – a neat trick at a gathering over punch and cookies.

Together with the right spirit and setting, next came Wise’s glamorous, incentives to sell. It was entrepreneurial genius for which Brownie Wise is remembered with admiration by the corporate world right up to the present day.

Typical of her flair for drama — Wise carried a lump of plastic she called Poly around in her purse, inviting her cohort of Tupperware representatives to rub the original slag of material to bring them luck in their endeavours.

Wise choreographed the annual Homecoming Jubilee Rallies in Florida for the best Tupperware demonstrators. With a free trip to Orlando, these flashy prize-giving meets included speeches, and prizes including mixers, cars and mink coats.

Slyly stoking competition with the pearls and twin-set wives and mothers, some of these sellers would have outstripped their male partners income with a feverish calendar of events.

With the kitchen connected respectability intact, the little wife was a bobby-socked winner at home and a prestigious achiever at her Jubilee. Wise said famously “You build the people and they’ll build the business” — her insight into the interactive relationship crucial to building a motivated sales force. At rallies and local promotions, the first lady of Tupperware would regularly offer her couture outfit as a prize to the attendees.

Tupper, watching Wise’s star in celebrity-ascent did what any 1950s red-blooded American man would do — he sacked her with one year’s salary but without any stocks in the company. He then sold Tupperware on for $16m and she was deliberately excised from the history of the company.

6An advertisement recruiting for Tupperware, complete with vintage spelling mistakes

The Tupperware Wonder Bowl fared a lot better. Made from 1946 to 1999 in a foggy Poly-T plastic, it featured Tupperware’s patented air and watertight lid. Consumers were wild for its contemporary look and the range of colours with juicy, gemstone names offered with the product. The bowls were ideal for everything from picnics to family BBQs and saving everyday left-overs in the new Cadillac sized refrigerators staged front and centre to impress the Jones’ over iced tea. Husbands were often recruited in by their wives, helping not only with party setups, but developing the crucial network of sellers and distribution to get the product out there as a middle-class staple. The ultimate goal was to gain a valuable franchise on local Tupperware distribution to dealers.

Today, despite considerable competition, the firm still dub themselves, “The Experts of Fresh”. The Tupperware approach remains a high-energy model, and to some onlookers slightly cultist in the frenetic enthusiasm of its rallies — sold as “partying for a living”. Brownie Wise has quite rightly resurfaced as a champion of female empowerment for women of all races since the 50s, and there’s even a park dedicated to her memory in Osceola County, Kissimmee, Florida.

The latest Tupperware range is BPA, Phthalates and dioxin free. There’s cookware, bakeware, utensils, cold-brew carafes, microwave pressure-cookers and much more on offer. To buy, you can host a Couch Party without even leaving home for you, your family and friends to order from the online catalogue. As at-home entertaining returns, you can book a party: setting a time, date and location, defining the theme of your party to the local consultant. For more information go to tupperware.ie or email the Irish Tupperware distributor at: e-mail: [e-mail]