TriMas Corp. is more than quadrupling its plant space in New Albany, Ohio, to boost production of its Rieke-brand soap dispensing pumps and other products primarily for the personal-care market. In preparation, the company is already leasing a 234,000-square-foot facility that is still being built.
Operations at the company's existing, 55,000-square-foot plant in New Albany, 15 miles northeast of Columbus, will be moved into the larger building. Production should begin in the second quarter of 2022, TriMas said.
The company has about 10 injection presses at the existing facility. Though it would not reveal how many new machines it expects to add, it said the new plant will be highly automated with advanced injection molding and assembly equipment. TriMas Packaging President Fabio Salik said via email July 30 that the company will invest about $20 million in the expansion and double its workforce to about 80 over five years.
The new facility will allow TriMas to localize production of a variety of products, including foaming and traditional dispensers, that currently are produced overseas for a large customer, "while providing incremental capacity for new business growth," Salik said. He declined to identify the customer or where the products are made now.
TriMas Corp. specializes in three areas: packaging, which generates about 65 percent of TriMas' overall sales, followed by the aerospace and specialty products segments, which comprise about 21 percent and 14 percent of total sales, respectively.
In addition to Rieke, TriMas Packaging consists of the following brands: Taplast (spring pumps, push-pull caps, clip caps and child-proof closures), Affaba & Ferrari (caps and closures), and Rapak (aseptic and standard bags, flexible packaging for liquids and bag-in-box filling operations).
The packaging operations, primarily Rieke, experienced record sales growth in 2020, which the company attributed largely to demand for its closures for personal hygiene products during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sales in the segment for 2020 rose 24.5 percent (18.5 percent of which was organic) to $488.3 million as compared with 2019. TriMas Packaging also reported record quarterly sales of $139.6 million for the second quarter of 2021.
TriMas Packaging employs about 2,000 worldwide at 20 locations. The Rieke operations are based in Auburn, Ind.
TriMas Corp. employs some 3,200 in 11 countries. The Bloomfield, Mich.-based company is traded on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol TRS.