Dr. Gad Rausing (19 May 1922 – 28 January 2000) was a notable Swedish industrialist and archaeologist. Together with his brother Hans he co-inherited Swedish packaging company Tetra Pak (later Tetra Laval), founded by their father Ruben Rausing and currently the largest food packaging company in the world.[1] In 1995 Rausing bought his brother's part of the company in what was at the time called the most extensive private buyout ever in Europe.[2]
Gad Rausing had a life-long passion for archaeology and the humanities and was an accomplished scholar, earning his Ph. D. from the University of Lund in 1967 with a dissertation on Scandinavian pre-historic bows and arrow-heads.[3][4] In addition to his work as Deputy Managing Director at Tetra Pak he was a frequent lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology at Lund University and the author of several books.[5]
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Rausing was born in Bromma, outside of Stockholm, in 1922 as the eldest son of industrialist Ruben Rausing and his wife Elisabeth (née Varenius). He had two younger brothers, Hans and Sven.
Rausing studied chemistry at the University of Lund and started his career as head of the research laboratory at his father's company Åkerlund & Rausing, where he was in charge of the team developing suitable materials for the newly invented tetrahedron package.[6] The tetrahedron subsequently became the key product for Tetra Pak, which was founded in 1951 as a subsidiary to Åkerlund & Rausing.[7]
Rausing joined Tetra Pak as Deputy Managing Director in 1954. Over the years the company evolved from a small family business with six full-time employees, in 1954, into a multi-national corporation with over 20,000 employees (2011), a development much of which has been credited to the leadership of Rausing and his brother throughout the 1960s and 1970s.[8][9][10] The enormous success of the business was in large part due to the revolutionary aseptic packaging technology, developed in the 1950s and early 1960s and later called the most important food packaging innovation of the 20th century.[11]
Rausing had a parallel career as a scholar in pre-historic Scandinavian archaeology and was a Reader at the Institute of Archaeology at Lund University.[12] Asked how he could uphold a position in senior management of a global corporation and do archaeological research at the same time, he stated "a fair number of left-over hours in airports and planes" as his key to finding the time.[13]
Rausing’s passion for the humanities led to his frequent sponsoring of various research projects, among others the excavation of the 10th Century Viking trading town of Birka outside Stockholm.[14] Rausing’s foundation, The Birgit and Gad Rausing Foundation, awards grants to research within the humanities and supports several important institutions, among others the Lund and Oxford universities.[15][16]
In 2002, the Gad Rausing Prize for Outstanding Humanistic Research was instituted by Rausing’s three children in memory of their father at the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, where Gad Rausing was a member during his lifetime.[17] Rausing became Doctor Honoris Causa at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1983.[18]
Gad Rausing was married to Birgit Rausing and had three children, Finn, Jörn and Kirsten.