WHEELING, ILL. — Coregistics, an Atlanta-based packaging company, just made a sweet deal.
The company said today that it acquired Wheeling-based Cano Packaging Corp., which specializes in confection and food industry packaging. The purchase expands Coregistics' footprint to five locations across the United States. Last April the company — owned by holding company IAM Acquisition LLC — completed the acquisition of New Jersey-based Market Resource Packaging LLC.
Coregistics' business is in primary and secondary contract packaging: think variety bags of Halloween candy, shrink-wrapped, family-size condiment packs for summer barbecues and large isle displays in big-box stores like Costco or Walmart offering everything from package deals on assorted cereals to high-end fragrance gift sets.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Eric Wilhelm, Coregistics' CEO, said the purchase follows the industrywide trend of consolidation and brings the company much closer to its short-term revenue goal of $100 million a year. Moreover, acquiring Cano positions Coregistics in a critical market. "Chicago is at the center of the contract packaging world," he said, due in part to its robust food manufacturing sector and its status as a transportation hub.
Cano has 250 employees operating out of an 180,000-square-foot facility in Wheeling. Wilhelm said he plans to expand to 1,000 employees in 1 million square feet of operations space within three years. "We will explode that over the next two years," he said of the 250 employees. "We plan on making an impact in Chicago in both size of facility and employees."
Effective immediately, Cano is part of Coregistics, under the direction of Wilhelm. Former Cano CEO Ron Lemmon will remain a trusted friend and adviser to the organization, Wilhelm said.
The trend of repackaging an already manufactured product — called "late-stage differentiation" — has become more commonplace as retail chains and consumer brands angle for customers by offering them a unique product within a product. As such, the business of customized packaging and design for point-of-purchase displays is becoming more popular, Wilhelm said. By making strategic partnerships with design companies and material manufacturing companies, Coregistics said it can offer its customers the best service possible.
"At Coregistics we want to slay dragons," he said. "We want to slash costs and time to create the most efficiency the most expediency and the most cost effective way to get the customer's idea to the shelf."