May 1, 1985

LAST January Wayne Meisel walked 1,500 miles between Maine and Washington, D.C., stopping at 70 colleges and talking to students, faculty members and townspeople about involving undergraduates as volunteers in community improvement. Looking back now, he sees his journey as ''an act of desperation''; he had begun to doubt that he could muster the support and money he needed to turn his idea into a national reality. Today, his operation, the Campus Outreach Opportunity League, or COOL, has an office, a modest staff and a budget because of a $17,500 grant from the Edward W. Hazen Foundation, a small philanthropy in New Haven. Such grants to young orgnizations without proven records are relatively rare. Most foundations prefer to give money to well-established institutions or to scholars and scientists connected with those institutions.

Until three months ago, the A.J. Canfield Company was little more than a small, albeit successful, soft-drink bottler in Chicago. Then came the Diet Chocolate Fudge Soda craze, and things at 61-year-old Canfield's have not been the same since. In mid-January, Bob Greene, a syndicated columnist for The Chicago Tribune, extolled Canfield's 2-calorie Diet Chocolate Fudge Soda as the perfect foil for his chocolate habit. ''Taking a sip of the stuff is like biting into a hot fudge sundae,'' Mr. Greene wrote.

The Reagan Administration, removing a thorn in relations between the United States and Japan, has agreed to give a new Japanese air-cargo carrier, Nippon Cargo Airlines, permission to serve the United States, a senior Administration official said today. The decision, which ends a 14-month controversy, is expected to be announced Wednesday in Bonn at a meeting between Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Foreign Minister Shintaro Abe of Japan. Both are attending the seven-nation economic summit meeting. Progress in Trade Talks The agreement, which also contemplates expansion of passenger airline service between the two countries, came as a senior American trade negotiator reported progress in talks with Tokyo to open Japanese markets in telecommunications and other sectors where there are barriers against imports.

A front-page article yesterday about the Atlantic Richfield Company's restructuring misstated the charge the company will take against earnings.

ONE morning recently a shopper paused at the frozen juice section in a large new supermarket in Danbury, Conn. Most of the juice concentrates were packaged in familiar short round cans made of paper and foil with metal lids. One brand, however, came in a plastic container with a pop-off top. With only a moment's hesitation the shopper reached for it. Why? ''When I get up in the morning I don't have time to spend on breakfast,'' she explained. ''I just pull off the lid, set the plastic can in the microwave, and after a few seconds the juice is ready to pour into the blender.'' The scene illustrates one major reason for packaging and processing innovations that, according to manufacturers, are changing the ways Americans buy and prepare their food: convenience, in both packaging and food preparation. The availability of new plastic packaging materials makes it possible to present food in containers that are lighter-weight, easier to handle and less fragile than ever before. Thus far, it has had little or no effect on how the products taste, but that could change in the future.