There are devices in the retail world you take for granted. Let’s stop doing that.

Bubble wrap

• Patented: 1960
• First patent holders: Marc A. Chavannes and Alfred W. Fielding

Off the wall: In 1957, Alfred Fielding, a mechanical engineer who had a machine shop in Hawthorne, New Jersey, and Marc Chavannes, a Swiss chemical engineer, were trying to get an idea off the ground.

And onto the wall.

They were hunkered down trying to invent wallpaper that, unlike typical wallcovering, would have a layer of textured plastic atop it.

At one point, they fused two plastic shower curtains together by running them through a heat-sealing machine. They may not have been intending for air pockets to form in between, but when it happened, they saw potential and developed a machine and process that could do so in a grid.

This plastic film with what they called air “cells” in their patent application—or, what anyone today would recognize as Bubble Wrap—was ingenious, but turned out to not make a lot of sense for wallpaper.

• Fielding and Chavannes formed Sealed Air Corporation, in 1960, and Job No. 1 was to figure out how to market the product, which they called Air Cap.

Like any entrepreneurs, they were trying to think outside of the box. But it turned out that the best place for their invention was inside of it.

Package deal: In October 1959, IBM announced it was introducing what would become one of its first popular commercial computers, the 1401 Data Processing System.

IBM was looking for a way to ship all those computers, and Sealed Air’s material was about to finally get its close-up.

“It was the answer to IBM’s problems,” Chad Stephens told Smithsonian Magazine in 2019, when he was a VP at Sealed Air (he’s since left the company). “They could ship their computers without damage. That opened the door for a lot of other businesses to start using Bubble Wrap.”

Click here to see how this story wraps up.—AAN

When it comes to vertical farms, a new facility may be the cream of the crop.

This week, indoor vertical-farming company Crop One Holdings and Emirates Flight Catering opened Emirates Crop One (ECO 1), which it says is the world’s largest vertical farm, in Dubai.

The 330,000-square-foot facility is hydroponic, meaning it grows plants sans soil using nutrient-enriched water, and is set to grow 2 million pounds of greens annually.

• Crop One opened its first vertical farm at its headquarters in Millis, Massachusetts, in 2015; it signed a $40 million joint venture with Emirates in 2018 to build this new farm.

The facility monitors and adjusts levels of lighting, nutrients, and humidity, and while the tech for this can be pricey, Crop One CEO Craig Ratajczyk told Fast Company that “size does matter in the food production space.”

“When you’re talking about something this large, the economics work out well,” Ratajczyk said. “So it turns out to be a very profitable farm.”

Leaf no trace: Beginning this month, travelers aboard Emirates and other airlines will be served the farm’s lettuce, arugula, spinach, and mixed salad greens on their flights, while shoppers in the UAE can buy the products in stores sold under the brand name Bustanica.

• Since no pesticides or herbicides are used, consumers can skip washing them, per Ratajczyk.

Zoom out: Vertical-farming startups, which scored $1.6 billion in funding last year per Pitchbook, could help cut water use and emissions within farming—but they still take a lot of energy to run, Emerging Tech Brew noted. While ECO 1 claims it uses 95% less water than traditionally grown produce, it does still run on conventional energy, though Ratajczyk said it has plans to utilize solar panels.—EC

Today’s top retail reads.

Meating expectations: Pepperoni production for Beyond Meat’s Pizza Hut partnership has hit snag after snag—just one example of the alt-meat company’s product-development shortcomings. (Bloomberg)

Extra baggage: How a footlong Subway sandwich cost an Australian woman $1,844. (Washington Post)

Trendspotting: TikTok may be taking over for Instagram as fashion’s go-to social platform for trend forecasting. (Business of Fashion)

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Three of the stories below are real...and one is most definitely not. Can you spot the fake?

1. Ice cream company Salt & Straw and fragrance brand Imaginary Authors collaborated on a line of edible fragrances that can either be worn as a perfume or sprayed on ice cream.
2. JW Anderson introduced an $895 clutch that is nearly identical in color and dimension to a pigeon.
3. A bike shop in Portland, Oregon, had let anyone use its electric-air machine to inflate their tires for free over its entire 30 years in business, but recently began charging $1 and blamed, naturally, inflation.
4. Because of the shortage of sunflower oil across Europe brought on by Russia’s war on Ukraine, a Munich brewpub is encouraging customers to exchange a liter of sunflower for a liter of beer instead of paying cash.

Keep reading for the answer.

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