Global Reach: Area Manufacturers Reach Outward And Inward

Products made in the Wilmington area are turning up all over the country – even the world.

The lower Cape Fear region isn’t known as a manufacturing hub, but the number of such companies is growing, as is their market reach and advocacy.

Take PaperFoam, for example. In 2007, the Netherlands-based packaging company established a plant in Leland to serve a large client in Pender County. After years of slow growth, in 2020 PaperFoam took a big gamble, making a major investment in a larger plant across the river in Wilmington to produce its injection-molded paper packaging (read more about the company’s products in this issue’s MADE feature here).

“Injection molding is usually plastic, but our [process] injects a mixture of paper, potato starch and some cellulose. Ours is biodegradable, compostable and recyclable with other paper items within eight weeks,” said Malcolm Ford, PaperFoam’s global chief operations officer. “We started with this material 25 years ago in Europe and built a strong business in Europe and the Far East,” Ford continued, noting that PaperFoam has plants in the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Malaysia. “Only recently has the U.S. begun to catch up with sustainability. We’re still on a journey of education.”

Realizing that U.S. demand for their sustainable packaging products might be taking off as more American companies took sustainability responsibilities seriously, Ford scouted larger facilities in the area, settling on a much larger space along Wilmington’s U.S. 421 corridor that the company now occupies. “We went from a 20,000-square-foot unit in Leland where we had 30 machines to a brand-new facility in Wilmington with 101,000 square feet of space,” he said. “We have infrastructure in place for over 102 machines. That’s our commitment to the future and to the product. We put our money where our mouth is.”

And speaking of mouths, because it’s made mostly of potato starch, PaperFoam can be recycled in an unusual way: as animal feed.   “Starch is the mainstay of quite a number of foodstuffs,” Ford said. “We’re not selling this yet in the United States, but in Europe we’re selling waste to pig farmers. It has a slightly sweet taste; I occasionally eat our products to demonstrate how digestible it is. It’s that safe.”

So where can PaperFoam packaging be found? All across the country, Ford said, cushioning everything from medical and dental instruments to a number of products at Walmart to Burt’s Bees personal care products in displays near the cash register. A more recent customer is HelloFresh, which cradles fragile recipe ingredients like eggs in PaperFoam. The packaging is custom-made for each customer, adjusting the shape of each product but using the same process and machinery.  Nine months after overseeing the company’s move into its new facility, Ford says he is seeing PaperFoam’s investment and his business development efforts starting to pay off, with some “huge companies” taking a serious look at its customized packaging materials.

Read the full article in the Wilmington Business Journal