It is very well known that at the present time the storage, transportation and consumption of cans for containing food-type and refreshing beverages such as fruit and vegetable juices, dairy liquid or pasty products, soft drinks, beers and the like, is a very important and popular economical activity throughout the world. Canned beverages, on the other hand, have a very practical usefulness in the art, due to the advantages shown thereby for their transportation and handling, which permits persons of all ages to easily handle this type of containers without running the risk of accidental breakage such as is common practice when handling glass containers or bottles.
However, the above described type of containers or cans show the serious drawback that they are highly heat conducting devices that do not assist in maintaining a suitable temperature for the contents thereof which may be appealing to the consumer of canned beverages, particularly when said cans have been exposed for a considerable period of time to hot weather or the mere solar radiation, for which reason said canned beverages must be subjected to a suitable cooling process before consumption thereof, either by direct or indirect contact with ice or by using a refrigeration device. This may prove to be rather difficult in places with low population as well as in remote locations such as secondary roads and the like, where it is practically impossible to have enough availability of ice or other refrigeration means. This, in turn, forces the consumers to necessarily consume the canned beverages at the ambient temperature that, in most of these cases, is unduly hot to provide a tasty and refreshing beverage.
On the other hand, in remote or semi-wild areas where the availability of electrical energy is scarce or practically inexistent or in areas populated by low income people who find it rather difficult to purchase a refrigerator, the problem of being forced to consume all types of canned beverages at ambient temperature remains, and in these areas the said beverages have to be consumed at temperatures that do not aid to render said canned beverages a tasty and refreshing article of consumption, thus defeating their main purpose, namely, that of being palatable and refreshing.
Although workers in the art have proposed various solutions to the above described problems, all of them have involved the use of external cooling, that is, cooling of the canned beverages by the application of ice externally thereof, for instance, in small and economical thermally insulated receptacles and the like, which devices only partially solve the problem because the same will remain for areas where no ice is available. To the applicant knowledge, no solution for cooling a canned beverage by means of internal cooling within the can has ever been proposed.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds