‘From the 1950s to the 1970s, there was a Tupperware party held every three seconds somewhere in the world’. Photo / Getty Images
‘From the 1950s to the 1970s, there was a Tupperware party held every three seconds somewhere in the world’. Photo / Getty Images
Through sheer coincidence, I was chatting about Tupperware the day before it announced its 50 per cent share price plummet. Walking into a friend’s house on Easter Sunday I handed over the cheesecake that I’d made the night before. “Thank goodness for Tupperware,” she said, carefully placing the plastic box in the fridge. I laughed, and agreed.
Tupperware is such a familiar word, so synonymous with steady and reliable kitchen storage, and one that we’ve all been using for years. But when I looked closely at my drawer of plastic containers, they were mostly by rival brand Sistema.
On asking friends whether they had any Tupperware, they all claimed to have “drawers full of the stuff”, and then came back with “Oh, it’s OXO” or “Actually, Pyrex”. Might the 77-year-long Tupperware party finally be over?
It’s fair to say that the current situation looks bleak. Not only did shares go down almost 50 per cent on Monday, but they are down 90 per cent over the past year. Its Preliminary Full Year 2022 Financial Summary showed net sales of $1.3 billion – half of what they were a decade ago. However tenuous your grasp of the markets, this is clearly not a pretty picture.
And Tupperware’s problem is global. Net sales in South America and Korea increased last year, but in China and Europe they have declined in the double digits. Tupperware has over 8500 functional design and utility patents, and it is distributed in almost 70 countries globally, but experts say that it is in a precarious position, as it struggles to stay relevant and solvent.
The company has fallen from a truly great height. A Tupperware party – where attendees would join in activities (such as playing catch with a juice-filled tub to illustrate its leak-proof qualities), swap recipes, share family stories, then go home laden with state-of-the-art food storage – was considered to be the epitome of glamour for decades.
Within a few years of its launching in the US, 76 per cent of American homes contained Tupperware, says Alison J Clarke, professor of design history and theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She is the author of Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America, which vividly describes the company’s heyday. “From the 1950s to the 1970s, there was a Tupperware party held every three seconds somewhere in the world, Elizabeth Taylor hosted a Tupperware party on her yacht in the 1960s, and don’t forget the Queen kept her cornflakes in a Tupperware box.”
American inventor Earl Tupper launched the first product, the plastic Wonder Bowl, in 1946.
“At the time there was suspicion around plastic and it initially didn’t sell well,” says Clarke. The Wonder Bowl – still the most iconic product – was both air and water-tight, at a time when few had fridges in their homes.
The US firm said it had ‘substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern’, after its shares dropped by 50 per cent. Photo / Getty Images
The global success of Tupperware is arguably thanks to single mother and Detroit-based saleswoman Brownie Wise.
“She started to sell it door to door, creating an allure around the products,” explains Clarke. These home demonstrations created an entirely new sales model – the Tupperware party. By 1948, Wise was earning almost £1000 ($2008) a week and Tupper employed her as his head of home sales.
It’s an unlikely marriage, but Tupperware parties were a key part of second-wave feminism.
“One reason for the extraordinary success of Wise’s approach is how alienated suburban women were at the time. Tupperware parties offered a justifiable domestic reason to get together with other women,” says Clarke. She points out that there was a subversiveness to some of the games – one was called “Hubby” – and was how to sell your husband.
Tupperware arguably contributed to the emancipation of women from the kitchen, along with the introduction of labour-saving devices such as fridges and washing machines, and of course, their products meant that women could bulk cook and store meals for later use.
However, Clarke argues that the wide scope of their products – such as lollipop makers and complicated jelly moulds could also be blamed for expanding the domestic role. “The catalogues are putting pressure on women to be immaculate domestic goddesses.”
The first British party – and indeed Tupperware’s entry into Europe – was held in Weybridge, Surrey, in 1960, bringing a flash of Stateside excitement and sunshine to the suburbs with such items as the Square Seal Freezer Box and TV Tumbler cup, as well as games that would these days make you chain yourself to the nearest set of railings – “Waist Measurement” and “Game of Gossip” being just a couple.
“Their global expansion was genius,” says Clarke. “They had direct feedback on the ground from women around the world, and they adapted products depending on where they were selling – in the UK the obsession was keeping sand out of sandwiches on the beach, for example, so that became one of their main copy lines.”
The TV Tumbler was introduced in 1955, under the slogan “Christian Dior isn’t the only one coming out with a New Look.”
“Tupperware parties were such fun,” says Alison Lester, now 63, who hosted them in the 1980s and now owns the website Tupperware Queen. This is, she tells me, the only UK distributor of the entire Tupperware catalogue.
“I was only just married, age 26, and I ran them for about four years. You were trained to do them, and then it was like performing; you’d turn up and do games and recommend new products. I always used to make something as a demonstration – there was a container into which you could put a dip and surround it with crisps, and you could sell a lot of Tupperware in just a couple of hours.”
She points out that Tupperware is an investment: “I have customers who have 50-year-old Tupperware.”
This all leads to the question, for something so beloved, where has it all gone so terribly wrong, and is there any way of salvaging the situation?
“I think it started to go wrong in the 1980s,” says Clarke. “They continued their innovative approach, but women simply didn’t have time to attend the parties, so they introduced office parties, and then started selling in shops in the US in the early 2000s. That was the end really. They had always had a new market to rely on – India, post-Soviet Eastern Europe, but once the Tupperware parties fell away, you just have a very expensive product.”
“There are a number of reasons for their current predicament,” says retail expert and founder of Retail Reflections, Andrew Busby.
“Firstly, their direct sales model will have been severely impacted by the pandemic – obviously this usually relies on face-to-face interaction.”
Tupperware apparently enjoyed a boost during Covid-19 because of the increase in home baking, but it attributes the decline in China sales to pandemic-related lockdowns and absences. Fair enough.
Less forgivably, Busby says that the company isn’t appealing to the younger generation.
“Their website is uninspiring, it’s not cool and there’s nothing innovative or exciting.”
Tupperware has a beguiling 10-year warranty, but the kitchen storage market is highly competitive, and especially given that kitchenware products are – as Mintel’s 2022 Tableware and Cookware report points out – replacement driven. The main Tupperware website has a picture of three women and one man sitting down and happily comparing brightly coloured kitchen storage. It doesn’t exactly feel relevant. As Busby says – it needs to appeal to the Uber Eats generation.
There are many other brands that are creating more streamlined, sexier-looking and far less expensive offerings.
A US Good Housekeeping piece last summer created a list of top food storage containers; Rubbermaid, OXO, Joseph Joseph… and not a mention of Tupperware. “If brands don’t change and evolve, they are going backwards,” explains Busby.
In addition, he says that Tupperware isn’t capitalising on the zeitgeist.
“They have a product that keeps food fresh for longer – this is during a cost of living crisis when we’re all concerned about food waste. It’s a golden opportunity to push Tupperware as an investment buy, especially as many supermarkets don’t publish use-by dates anymore. But I’m not seeing that message.”
Since 2010, Tupperware has changed the composition of its plastic so that it’s free from BPA, a hormone-disrupting chemical found in older plastics. “Again,” says Busby, “there was an opportunity to engage with customers, and perhaps offer money off when returning old products.”
Its social media is – and I say this as someone who has been trying to contact it via Twitter for a couple of days – not great.
“It’s completely unrelatable,” agrees Busby. “There’s no excuse for the lack of engagement with customers, especially during the pandemic, when other companies went out of their way to maintain a strong presence.”
He sees no way back for Tupperware. “From what I’ve read, it sounds as though they’ve reached the end of the road. Their statements are very fatalistic in tone.”
However, the loyalty of true Tupperware fans cannot be underestimated. Somerset-based Lester has spent the past couple of weeks doing a revamp of her website. She has a new Tupperware supplier and is starting to recruit nationwide for party hostesses.
“There’s something very special about Tupperware,” she emphasises.
