Mexico City — Prominent Mexican food packaging thermoformer Goplás SA de CV has ordered two additional machines from West Palm Beach, Fla.'s OMV Technologies USA LLC as it eyes increased business in the United States.
Together with OMV, Goplás announced the purchase of one of OMV's most innovative products, the RM77, on Feb. 22.
The machine is operating and working gradually toward its full capacity, Goplás co-founder and Managing Director Jesús Ordorica Hernández told Plastics News in a March 4 Spanish-language email.
The family-owned company, which launched in mid-1994, followed up its RM77 purchase by buying two F87s from OMV, said Ordorica.
"The first will come onstream at the end of this year and the second in late 2025," he added.
Goplás supplies clients in the food packaging sector across the Americas, including Mexico, the United States, Canada, Guatemala and Jamaica.
It has 550 employees, annual sales of $36 million and an average annual growth of 7 percent, according to Ordorica. Among its customers is Unilever plc's ice cream division.
Asked whether the acquisitions from OMV indicated that Goplás would pitch for more business contracts in the United States, for example, Ordorica replied: "Yes. For the moment I should not like to mention what they are."
According to Brooke Maltun, OMV's president, the RM77 includes cutting-edge engineering with inline rim rolling technology, fully automatic in-mold trimming and a revolving mold. It can produce 174,000 water cups per hour, according to OMV.
OMV supplied Goplás with the Mexican company's first-ever thermoforming machine, an E54. No longer in operation, the E54 was Goplás's only OMV machine until the RM77 arrived.
Ordorica Hernández was the brains and driving force behind Goplás's creation 30 years ago. His late father, Jesús Ordorica Paulín, and late uncle, José Guadalupe García Jiménez, provided the project's initial capital. Both men died in 2004.
On its website, Goplás states it is a 100 percent Mexican company dedicated to the manufacture and printing of plastic and biodegradable containers using polypropylene, polystyrene, polyethylene, paper and PET for the food industry.
Its manufacturing plant is in Lechería Tultitlán, part of the Mexico City metropolitan area.
In addition to thermoforming systems, the six-decades-old OMV Technologies also manufactures extruders and tooling systems.
Maltun and Mark Strachan, both packaging industry veterans, acquired OMV Machinery srl, of Verona, Italy in November 2021, through a company called MalStra LLC. They renamed it OMV Technologies LLC and transferred its headquarters to Florida while retaining OMV's manufacturing in Italy. OMV was previously a division of Switzerland's Wifag/Polytype Holding AG.