Horticultural products manufacturer McConkey Co. has closed after 60 years in Sumner, Wash., and production was moved to Canada after a couple of its top executives branched into an artificial intelligence (AI) firm called CognitionWorks.
Founded in 1964, third-generation family-owned McConkey Co. produced square and round containers, pots, packs, hanging baskets, bowls, flats and trays from plastic scrap at a 72,000-square-foot facility near Seattle.
While the company is credited with many innovations, including terra cotta-colored plastic pots to compete against clay, its products became a commoditized segment.
"Unfortunately, the costs of making them at McConkey's plant near Seattle increased significantly over the last five years, skilled labor was increasingly hard to find, and the West Coast is highly exposed to cheap freight from Asian manufacturing centers," former McConkey CEO Derek Moeller said in an email.
Company officials made a difficult decision to close, he added, and McConkey began shutting down in stages through May while shipping continued into June.
"We worked with our partners to move the injection molding production to a lower cost producer in Edmonton, Canada, where the products will continue to be made and sold to the industry," Moeller said. "We do still have thermoformers, molds and a sheet line that buyers are looking at now."
Meanwhile, lessons learned about AI at McConkey Co. are helping grow CognitionWorks, which Moeller co-founded in Seattle in March 2023 with Stina McConkey.
Stina McConkey is chief operating officer of CongitionWorks, which specializes in training a processor's AI with manufacturing documents the client already has.
McConkey also had the COO role at the company started by her grandparents. There, AI was used to interact with work orders, manuals, procedure books and other documentation to replace institutional knowledge at risk of being lost as veteran employees retired.
"With the advent of AI, we felt we were in a unique position to have a bigger impact by taking everything we learned about the complexities and challenges of running a plastics plant, and apply them to CognitionWorks' mission of building an AI-powered tribal knowledge system that allows plastics processors' teams to have perfect recall, knowledge, and ability to act quickly and decisively to fix machines, diagnose tooling issues, make operational improvements, and make accurate judgments quickly," Moeller said.
CongnitionWorks' manufacturing assistant program is called SprocketAI.
"Since introducing the platform out of private beta earlier this year, we've had many companies sign up who had the same issues of turnover, difficulty of finding skilled labor, and challenges of collaboration within and between plants," Moeller said. "They're now using our SprocketAI system in medical molding, blow molding, thermoforming, thin-wall packaging molding and extrusion."