Kickstart: Who's got the frunk?

Are you ready for some football?

Wait, wasn't that last week?

Yes, the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl on Feb. 2, but Ford Motor Co. is looking to cash in from every fan dreaming of next season's tailgating parties by offering up the front storage in its Mustang Mach-E electric SUV as an alternative to a cooler.

The front storage area (which Ford likes to call a "frunk" for "front trunk") is a 4.8-cubic-foot plastic space equivalent to a 36-gallon cooler and sits in the spot where an engine would be placed in a standard car.

"Fans can forget about lugging a heavy cooler to a tailgate," Ford writes in a news release. "Just fill the front trunk with ice and beverages and cruise right up to your tailgate. When you're done, open the drain cap at the bottom of the front trunk and let gravity do the rest."

As an option, turn the "frunk" into a version of cornhole by challenging friends to a "closest to the front trunk" contest.

Folks with visions of frunk frivolity have time to plan. Deliveries of the Mach-E begin in late 2020.

Those are Tom Bolger's words, not mine, during an interview with Plastics News' Frank Esposito about Chroma Color Corp.'s purchase of Plastics Color Corp.

Chroma is part of Arsenal Capital Partners and Arsenal's George Abd has always had an eye out for opportunities to develop new companies through acquisition.

"PCC has a lot of focus in pharmaceutical and medical, where we had done some work but wanted to do more. They have a lot of approvals and qualifications in those markets," Bolger said.

Vinyl records are in back in demand. While streaming music has far more listeners (making up 80 percent of record industry revenue, according to the Record Industry Association of America), vinyl has been growing steadily. The renewed interest by music buyers has vinyl set to overtake CDs for sales, according to RIAA.

That's meant new business for makers of LPs and the companies that make those presses.

But Pitchfork magazine reports that a fire destroyed one of only two companies in the world that makes the lacquer needed for master discs — those discs are used to press individual records.

Apollo Masters of Banning, Calif., says on its website: "We are uncertain of our future at this point and are evaluating options as we try to work through this difficult time."

"From my understanding, this fire will present a problem for the vinyl industry worldwide," Ben Blackwell, co-founder of Third Man Records told Pitchfork. Third Man presses vinyl in Detroit and Nashville, Tenn.