Crown Poly's Browne sees shifting market for plastic bags

Limited mobility for nearly all Americans has still meant regular trips to the grocery store. That's right in the wheelhouse for Crown Poly Inc., which provides supermarkets with the Pull-N-Pak plastic grocery bags.

The Huntington Park, Calif.-based plastics company has a bevy of eco-friendly products, including some made from reclaimed ocean plastics.

Crown Poly General Manager Cathy Browne talked innovation and sustainability in her recent chat with Plastics News Publisher Brennan Lafferty.

What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. The full "What Keeps You Up at Night?" podcast is available at www.plasticsnews.com/audio.

Q: Crown Poly got its start in the 1990s with a grocery product that I'm sure everyone has used. But they may not know that Crown Polly invented it. Tell us about the company's beginnings.

Browne: The owner of our company, Abraham Simhaee, had a distribution company and he used to import products, including produce bags, and he hated it. They were very poor quality. He had lots of returns, and it was just a problem. He's an inventor, and he decided to invent a new system. He studied the produce bag market and determined the bags were too small. They had originated in Southeast Asia. People there have different shopping habits than Americans. So, he changed the bag, made it much larger, put it in a dispenser, which was patented.

We started selling, we started producing and the rest is history. And 29 years later, we are the largest single produce bag manufacturer in one facility. We ship worldwide. We ship to all seven continents. We have majority market share in the United States. You can go to Dubai and see our bag. You can go to South America and see our bag. You can certainly go to Europe and see our bag. It's been a great journey.

Q: Grocery stores have been one of the few places where everyone can go. Has that meant an uptick in sales or greater demand for your Pull-N-Pak bags?

Browne: It was instant. Starting in March, there was certainly panic buying. Consumers flocked to the store to buy disinfectant wipes and toilet paper. They also ended up buying food. Certainly, there was an uptick overall in grocery sales and also produce sales. Consumers also switched to online shopping, including groceries. They did not want to have to go into the store to be exposed. They don't want to have to wait in line.

I think the uptick in supermarket sales will be permanent. I think consumers will realize that shopping and eating at home is more cost-effective. And from a sanitation standpoint, they'll feel more comfortable. So, I think that will be a permanent shift. How much of the online stays permanent? What percent it'll stay up? I'm not sure. But, yes, we definitely saw an immediate increase in business shifting from restaurant to supermarket and home cooking. And I think everybody can attest to the number of Instagram stories of all their friends making sourdough bread and baking.

Q: Crown Poly makes several products under the sustainability header. Do you see an emphasis on sustainability lessening because of the virus? Perhaps people might be less concerned with recyclability or compostability?

Browne: That's a great question. For us, we were green before green was in. When we started 29 years ago, the average produce bag was 11/12 micron and we downgauged it. We strongly believe in source reduction, and we downgauged to seven microns. From the beginning, we felt the superior performance or the beauty of plastics is its performance in thin gauges. We believed produce bags could be thinner. We believed front-end bags could be thinner and stronger and you don't have to double bag.

Certainly, in the past five years, we've been very keen on sustainability and finding solutions for our customers and proposing recycled content or compostable. In the last year, we came out with a very popular ocean plastic recycled line. With coronavirus, I think that issue is going to be secondary right now. The other beauty of plastics is, in a civilized society, we want to always advance, and sanitation and hygiene is one of those super benefits of plastics. And that is something I think everybody's reminded of during the time of this pandemic.

Q: Talk a little bit more about your product made from ocean plastics. What's the future for those types of products for Crown Poly?

Browne: I found out about this product at a conference. When I heard about it, I was immediately excited and talked to the supplier and said, "This is great. I think we can really do a lot with it."

From a consumer standpoint, I think it's such a visible kind of blight, and the environmentalists have certainly over and over castigated plastic for being in the ocean. They tried to put in textbooks in California the picture of a T-shirt bag over the ocean Pacific Ocean. This is the kind of the lessons young people are learning about plastics in the ocean. So, I think for consumers to understand that the plastic can be collected off the beach and made into other plastic products, upcycled if you will something that immediately the average consumer can understand.

Adidas sold over a million pairs of sneakers last year made out of ocean plastic. Windex went with a 100 percent ocean plastic bottle for their natural vinegar-based product. There's multiple examples now of ocean plastics being used in consumer brands to obviously positive reception. So, it's an easy-to-understand concept where some of the other concepts that are super sustainable are not necessarily as easily understood by consumers. And it's one that creates a lot of excitement.

So, the average mom out there who wants to use plastic products because it's convenient, it's sanitary, and all of the great things about plastic but has kind of an emotional guilt about it. The ocean plastics really fills that void of providing a great sanitary product that's super effective from a climate change carbon emission standpoint, water usage, all of these green reasons to use it. But they can say to their friend, "Hey, it's made out of ocean plastic and is taking plastic into the ocean." You get that emotionally positive or satisfying feeling as well.

Q: As a general manager, how do you continue to drive your own team to innovate during a time like this?

Browne: For us, innovation is a way of life. It's like breathing. Our founder is innovative. We have an R&D department. We hire engineers who have a lot of ideas. We encourage our production staff to come up with ideas. In fact, I just had a operator empowerment meeting with our front-line supervisors to say I want ideas coming out to the operators on the plant floor, because they're the people that can generate ideas that can either make it more efficient or teach her something or help us improve and be better.

For Crown Poly, we don't even think about it as kind of a mission. It literally is our way of life where everybody in our company right now during the pandemic, as busy as we are, we still think about ways to improve either our process, our company, our products. We're constantly thinking about innovation. Always. I think that's what keeps companies fresh, adaptable and nimble.

Q: Your governor seems to be taking a county-by-county approach to decide when restrictions can be lifted. What does that mean for Crown Poly and your employees?

Browne: California, known as being super liberal, I feel like our governor has been super conservative in his approach. We were the earliest to have shelter in place and it's going to continue to August. You see that the whole rest of country opening up much earlier. So, having said that, we're an essential business. One of the things we did early on was ensured that we were listed as an essential business. We got letters from the city and the county. We looked up the federal critical infrastructure requirements to make sure that we were listed as an essential business. We told our employees that and we gave them letters. We actually got letters from our local city ahead of time.

We prepared by ordering masks. It was like a free for all. But we immediately placed orders for all kinds of PPE, all kinds of disinfectants. We got quotes for disinfecting the plant. We prepared for if employees were sick and tested positive for COVID, how would we handle it? What do we do? We had employees in the office, but most work remote from home. I came to work every day because I thought it was important. If the people in the plant were going to come to work every day, I felt it was important for them to have a role model and the leader of the company show up for work. Our director of HR was here every day, interacting with people in the company. So, we kind of set that tone.

We took everybody's temperature before they were allowed to come into work. We emphasize hand-washing. We put up signs everywhere. We had hand sanitizer, like liquid gold. We purchased it early and put it out in the plant. We had a strict "no visitor" policy. One day we had a pipe burst. The plumbers came and we tested the plumbers. One of them had a fever. Our receptionist, without asking anybody, sent them away. She said, "You have a temperature; you're not allowed in." That's the appropriate thing to do. Those are the kinds of steps that we took to ensure the safety of our employees, to keep them safe and to make them feel safe. We could have had significant absenteeism because people aren't comfortable coming to work, but because they knew that we took this seriously, I think people were very comfortable coming. We had full staff, and we haven't had any issues. We haven't had any problems to date.

Q: What keeps you up at night?

Browne: I'm a very good sleeper, so not much keeps me up at night. I compartmentalize stuff. But the one thing I would say that I always have a concern for is our employees. I think I got that from our owner, who's my boss. He always said to me the people he cares the most about in our kind of our structure, we call it an upside-down pyramid, are the lowest paid. The most manual work employees are at the top of the pyramid. They are the most important to us because these are the people that if something happens to our company, they have difficulty getting a job. The chef whose restaurant closes will be able to find another chef position or start another restaurant. The dishwashers, the busboys, the waitstaff — those are the people in restaurants that are going to have a harder time finding a job.

That's the same in any company, particularly for a manufacturing company. These low-wage, more manual labor positions. Employees are the ones that we need to worry about. Those are the people that keep me up at night. I'm constantly astonished at how these people are able to have their kids at home because they're not in school, come to work, pay their rent, buy food, cook the food, clean up after the food, and do all of this and not complain. Those of us who are more fortunate or in different situations in our lives, we need to look at those people and have a lot of respect and ensure that what we do is positive and beneficial for them.