As early as the 19th century, before the emergence of large-scale retail, people usually purchased all daily items from grocery stores near their work or residence. It is a headache to sell daily necessities in wooden barrels, bags, or boxes to consumers in bulk after being transported to the grocery store. People can only go shopping with baskets or homemade linen bags. At that time, the raw materials for papermaking were still jute fiber and old hemp cloth, with poor quality and scarce quantity, which could not even meet the needs of newspaper printing. Around 1844, German Friedrich Kohler invented wood pulp papermaking, greatly promoting the development of the paper industry and indirectly giving birth to the first commercial paper bag in history. In 1852, American botanist Francis Waller invented the first paper bag making machine, which was later promoted to various European countries such as France and the United Kingdom. Later on, the birth of plywood paper bags and the advancement of paper bag stitching technology led to the replacement of cotton bags used for bulk cargo transportation by paper bags.
When it comes to the first shopping kraft paper bag, it was born in 1908 in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA. A local grocery store owner, Walter Duvina, started looking for ways to encourage consumers to purchase more things at once in order to boost sales growth. Du Weiner believes that it should be a pre made bag that is low-cost and easy to use, and can withstand at least about 75 pounds of weight. After repeated experiments, he locked the texture of this bag onto kraft paper because it uses coniferous trees with longer wood fibers for pulping. During the cooking process, mild chemicals such as caustic soda and sulfurized alkali were used to treat the wood fibers, resulting in less damage to their original strength. As a result, the resulting paper had tight connections between the fibers and was tough, Capable of withstanding significant tensile and pressure without rupture. Four years later, the first shopping kraft paper bag was born. It has a rectangular bottom and a larger capacity than traditional V-shaped bottom paper bags. A rope runs through its bottom and sides to increase its load-bearing capacity, and forms two pull loops at the upper end of the paper bag that are easy for people to handle. Duvina named this shopping bag after himself and applied for a patent for it in 1915. At this time, the annual sales volume of this shopping bag has exceeded 100 million units.