Stanpac Inc., a Canadian manufacturer of packaging supplies and containers for the food, beverage and dairy industries, is finishing up a two-year expansion at two of its manufacturing facilities.
The expansions, which cover a total of 200,000 square feet, is for new capacity at its headquarters in Smithville, Ontario, and a facility in Brenham, Texas. The company said equipment is almost in place and remaining space on the shop floor at the sites will be used for storing raw materials and work-in-progress materials.
"We simply just need more space due to rapid growth," Cody Kelly, engineering design manager, said in a Jan. 29 phone interview.
Kelly declined to say how much the company has invested in the expansion, but said work at the facilities should be completed in the next couple months. In the past five years, the company said, it has grown by more than 20 percent each year.
In 2017, Stanpac purchased Moducup LLC, a paper coffee cup manufacturer in Totowa, N.J., for an undisclosed amount. The company said it is keeping the Totowa facility, as well as Moducup's management team and employees, with plans to expand its capabilities and customer base. The acquisition and expansion have boosted Stanpac's employee headcount to 669 — up from 496 a year ago.
Murray Bain, vice president of marketing, said Stanpac's insert molded tamper-evident lids are enabling "solid growth" at the company.
"We're entering new markets in Mexico, and South and Central America with those products, as well," Bain said in a phone interview. The company has another facility in Querétaro, Mexico.
Stanpac makes containers and lids for the ice cream, soup and coffee industry, and custom caps and closures for the milk industry, among other products. Its tamper-evident ice cream lids are made from linear low-density polyethylene.
The company has 12 injection molding machines — three at its Texas facility and nine at its Smithville plant — with clamping forces of 300-400 tons. The presses are from Husky and Athena Automation.
Stanpac has invested a little more than $1 million in three 300-ton Athena injection molding machines — its most recent purchase of injection machines — Kelly said, citing the machinery maker's prompt response to engineering questions and machine reliability.
