Gad Rausing

Dr. Gad Rausing (19 May 1922 – 28 January 2000) was a Swedish industrialist and archaeologist. Together with his brother Hans he inherited the Swedish packaging company Tetra Pak, founded by their father Ruben Rausing and currently the largest food packaging company in the world by sales (2011). In 1995 Rausing bought out his brother's interest in the company in what was at the time the most extensive private buyout in Europe.

Gad Rausing had a lifelong passion for archaeology and the humanities and was an accomplished scholar, earning his PhD. from the University of Lund in 1967 with a dissertation on Scandinavian pre-historic bows and arrow-heads. 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.

Rausing was born in Bromma, outside of , 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 began his career as the head of the research laboratory at Åkerlund & Rausing, his father's company, where he was in charge of the team developing suitable materials for the newly invented tetrahedron package. The tetrahedron subsequently became the central product of Tetra Pak, which was founded in 1951 as a subsidiary to Åkerlund & Rausing.

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. The great success of the business was largely the result of their development of aseptic packaging technology, developed in the 1950s and early 1960s and later called the most important food packaging innovation of the 20th century.

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