The Sensical Reason Behind Pillsbury's Explosive Biscuit Tube

Pillsbury's tasty and easy doughs — crescent rolls, cinnamon rolls, biscuits, and more — have been packed and sold in tubes for so long now that no one even stops to wonder why. Consumers peel the paper off a tube of dough and with a twinge of anxiety wait for that very loud pop, which we know is coming but can still scare us every time. Why does Pillsbury love this exploding cylinder so much?

The idea for packaging dough in a cylindrical tube was patented way back in 1931 by Kentucky bakery owner Lively Willoughby. Twenty years later, Pillsbury bought the bakery, inheriting the dough-in-a-tube industry. The packaging was very appealing because the cylinders were light and easy to ship. However, the old-style tubes of dough also had a big problem: They were a real pain to open. Customers needed serious muscles to pull the metal ends off, and the only way to remove the dough was to either dig it out with a utensil or hack the cardboard tube apart. 

The solution: a tube that was designed to be broken. It took years of trial and error — and exploding dough everywhere — for Pillsbury to come up with this breakable invention.

To perfect the design of their dough tubes, Pillsbury had to find a delicate balance of a cardboard cylinder with an airtight seal to preserve the food inside, but that customers could also easily open. The company also had to package its ready-to-bake dough at just the right stage. They needed the active yeast to help the cardboard pop open at the right moment, but without causing the dough to expand and burst its seams while in transit or on store shelves. Pillsbury filed for their patent in 1958 and finally patented their perfect tube in 1961, and the illustrations from the application show exactly how to get that dough out: by giving it a whack. 

The company began promoting the new tubes in television ads to show customers how easily they opened. Just peel off the label, hit the side of the tube against a counter edge, and make the tube pop open along a long side seam. While thumping a tube of cinnamon rolls against your kitchen counter is a surefire way to get that satisfying pop, you can also try pressing a spoon or knife against the seam for a potentially less-explosive opening.