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Show Canning En Utah Has Grown During 33 Years Utah's food canning industry has packed more than 100 million mil-lion cases of canned fruits and vegetables in the last 33 year-. The industry, born to meet the needs of the populace, has grown into one of the most important im-portant exporters in the state, shipping foods that bring more than $15,000,000 a year into Utah for distribution to its workers, farmers and businessmen. business-men. The story of the rise of Utah's canning industry to its dominant position is traced by the American Amer-ican Can Company, which for 50 years has been supplying metal containers to the industry. Canning got its start in the state in 1888 in Ogden. That year only 300 cans of food were packed. The containers were made the previous winter by hand. The cost per can was greater than that of the fruit and vegetables packed. After the establishment of American Can in 1901, the output out-put of Utah canneries increased rapidly. In 1904 production hit 360,000 cases. Reliable records were not kept from then until 1917. when 1,330,000 cases were packed. Since then, the total to-tal pack has topped 100 million cases. Output had been limited because be-cause up to the first decade of the 1900's packers used old-style old-style cans. Fruits and vegetables had to be cut up and stuffed through holes in the tops of the cans, which were then capped. American Can perfected the modern can with its top completely com-pletely open before sealing. This permitted the canning o( whole fruits and vegetables and made it possible to process more products. The new can also led to the development of machinery, machin-ery, such as that in the Canco plant at Ogden, capable of turning out up to 450 containers a minute. Last year, the state's 45 canneries can-neries packed about 120,000,000 cans of fruits and vegetables not cou n t i n g a substantial amount of meats, jellies, milk, spaghetti and other products for which statistics are not available. The Army and Air Force offers of-fers free food, clothing, lodging, medical and dental care and .e-gal .e-gal assistance. |