Tomorrow’s World: Pack to the Future | Sugar Packing Machine

When Jim got too loud, my mother would race out of her salon to scold him, but he had a bomb squad's sense of timing.

The Treasury lifted the import restrictions on sugar in May last year to alleviate a crippling shortage before the August election.Importing duty-free sugar would only have been illegal if it was not fit for human consumption.

One Christmas morning we found him out cold on the couch beside the tree. We were certain his death would ruin the day until four-year-old Peter insisted on poking the body because it was in the way. And like a holiday miracle, the corpse twitched.

When a wafer doesn’t meet standards — when it is cracked, broken, improperly embossed — it is tossed into a tall plastic bin next to the factory line. The company recycles these substandard wafers as local animal feed. “This is the countryside, so we have farms,” Iwai said with a shrug. The good wafers — smooth, intact, deeply and evenly embossed — move along the line. They are covered with cream, then sandwiched with another wafer and more cream. The arms of a huge, gentle machine with extraordinary fine-tuned motor functions do all the work of building the Kit Kat, smoothing the cream and pressing the wafer on top of it, then pass the large, sheet-cake-size sandwiches along a slow conveyor belt through a massive cooler. After they’re cut, four sheets at a time, the Kit Kats begin to look familiar, like ladyfingers.

Shopping here is simple. Weigh the container that you’ve brought, and start filling it up! Everything from dried goods to household cleaning products and lifestyle goods are available here, nearly all of which are organic, and eco-friendly. Don’t let “organic” put you off though; things like organic chia seeds or quinoa are surprisingly very affordable here at Unpackt as the cost of packaging has been eliminated.

However, the BSE is not all about those feats. Like any other stock exchanges, it also had its worst days.

Taichiro Morinaga, the founder of the company behind Hi-Chew, grew up poor in Japan. In 1888, at 23, he moved to the United States, where he experienced candy for the first time and decided to become a candy maker. Eleven years later, he opened the Morinaga Western Confectionery Shop in Tokyo, and in 1918 it was the first Japanese candy company to produce chocolate. Years later, while searching for a gumlike candy that you can actually swallow so as to avoid the rude act of removing food from your mouth, he came up with the predecessor of the Hi-Chew, a Starburst-like candy with a softer texture. Since 1975, more than 170 Hi-Chew flavors have been on the market. The latest: Açaí, pineapple and caramel apple.

Since joining the Goel co-operative in 2012, Fiorenza has learnt to defend herself, using the attacks to create publicity and collect funds to restore the damage. “Then we throw a huge party to show that it’s useless to attack us,” she says. “If you strike one, you strike all. The fact that we are in it together gives us more strength.”

The group’s outsize ambitions and its robust bureaucracy hinged on its ability to generate funds. Bulging with accounting forms, budget projections and receipts, as well as two CD-ROMs containing spreadsheets, the briefcase shed light on the scope of the organization’s revenue machine and offered a blueprint for how it worked.

Since declaring a caliphate in 2014, the Islamic State has controlled large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria. But after the group retreated from Mosul and Raqqa in 2017, it lost nearly all of its territory.

Yet Antoci not only identified the Mafia’s scheme but devised the solution: new rules forcing even the smallest leaseholders to pass police checks, enforced retrospectively, with numerous confiscations of land. “When you take money out of their pockets, that’s when the Mafia retaliate,” he says.

Buhler has developed a non-leather polisher. The machine is in the testing phase and should be available by the end of 2016.