The earliest cans were made of glass bottles with cork and wire tightly plugging the mouth of the bottle. In 1795, the French emperor Napoleon led his army to conquer the Quartet. The seafarers who lived on the ship for a long time fell ill because they could not eat fresh vegetables, fruits and other foods, and some even suffered from serious life-threatening scurvy. Because the front line is too long, a large amount of food will rot and deteriorate after being transported to the front line. He hopes to solve the problem of food storage during wars and marches, so the French government uses a huge bonus of 12,000 francs to solicit a long-term food storage method. The technology and equipment for food spoilage will give him this huge sum of money. Many people have invested in research activities in order to win awards. Among them, the Frenchman Nicolas Appert (1749-1841), who dealt with candied fruit food, spent all their energy on continuous research and practice, and finally found a good way: put food into wide-mouth glass bottles, use Cork the bottle mouth, put it in a steamer to heat, then close the cork tightly and seal it with wax.

After ten years of painstaking research, he finally succeeded in 1804. He processed the food, put it into a jar, put it all in a boiling water pot, heated it for 30-60 minutes, plugged it with a cork while it was still hot, and then reinforced it with thread or sealed it with wax. It was published after being patented in 1810. In this way, food can be preserved for a long time without spoilage. This is the prototype of the modern canned food.

Appel won a prize from Napoleon and opened a factory to provide food for the French army. Shortly after Appel's glass jar came out, the Englishman Peter Durand developed a tin can made of thin iron and obtained a patent in the United Kingdom, which was later used by Hall and Gann. Bo (Gamble) and Dong Jin (Donkin) obtained. It is the ancestor of the commonly used tin cans.

In 1862, French biologist Pasteur published a paper explaining that food spoilage was caused by bacteria. Therefore, the canning factory adopts the steam sterilization technology to make the canned food reach the standard of absolute sterility. Today's foil-packed cans were born in the United States in the 20th century.