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Biddeford-based Volk Packaging Corp., manufacturer and distributor of corrugated boxes and foam products, will invest $7 million to upgrade its operations.

It will be the first company in the U.S. to have a “flexo folder-gluer” produced by JS Machine, a Chinese manufacturer of packaging machinery. A flexo is a large box-making machine.

“This is one of the largest projects we have done in our 53 years and it will take our company to whole new levels,” Volk’s president, Derek Volk, told Mainebiz. Volk is also a 2015 Mainebiz NEXT List honoree.

The 1228 JS Machine flexo has four-color printing capability, a bundle breaker and a die-cutter. Once the machine is installed, Volk Packaging will serve as JS Machine’s first showroom for the technology in North America.

Volk is planning to expand the 141,000-square-foot facility by another 25,000 to 30,000 square feet to accommodate expanded production with the new flexo. 

The machine will be installed in an existing warehouse; the expansion will mostly be new warehouse space.

In addition to the new flexo, Volk will install a new high-speed production line designed by Inspire Automation in Plover, Wisc. The line includes conveyors, transfer carts, robotics, bundlers, unitizers, a bundle breaker, a stretch wrapper and more.  

The total cost of the project is about $5 million. Construction of additional space will probably approach another $2 million.

A flexo and a die-cutter are the two primary pieces of equipment in any box plant, Volk explained. His firm currently has four flexos that date back to the 1970s and 1980s. The new one will replace at least two and perhaps three of the older machines. 

“It’s a game-changer for us,” he said. “We’ve kept up our machines really well and we have an incredible maintenance department. But this bring our operations to a whole new level.”

The new machine will improve efficiency about six-fold, he said. The older equipment runs one job at a time, and setting up the next job between runs takes an average 29 minutes. The flexo from JS Machine will allow an operator to set up multiple jobs while an order is running, decreasing set-up time to less than 5 minutes.

“The machines we currently have, have to be turned off and opened up to set up the next job,” he said. “The big difference is the fact that the new machine is a top printer, so the boxes actually run underneath where an operator has to be to set up.”

The machine’s efficiency essentially allows the company to pick up 322 shifts of work per year.

The boxes’ dimensional tolerances and print quality will be much higher as well, Volk said. For example, the slots that make it possible to close each box’s flaps will have a tolerance of 2 millimeters. The current slots can be off by nearly 4 millimeters. 

“Two millimeters is almost perfect,” Volk said.

The printing will also be sharper, with no bleeding of colors.

“This will have much tighter registration,” he said. “So we can go into markets that right now we can’t even try for.” For example, Volk does some business with a Massachusetts food company. “But they have more they could give us if we could run tighter registration. They want the colors on the box to be sharp,” he said. 

Volk and his team have been working on the acquisition for almost three years.

Last May, Volk sent his lead operator and maintenance director to China to see JS Machine’s manufacturing facilities. 

“The basic principles of running the machine are similar to what we’re doing now,” Volk explained. “It’s just that it’s going to be much more computer-based.”

Volk and his team are traveling to China in February to sign off on the machine. It’s expected the machine will arrive in Biddeford by late April and will be operational a couple of weeks after installation. 

Other companies in the U.S. have similar high-speed flexos. 

“I traveled around the country to see all these different versions of what you can get for a high-speed flexo,” he said. “They’re all great. We were just particularly impressed with what this machine has to offer as far as speed and quality.”

What sealed the deal was an agreement with JS Machine that Volk would serve as the U.S. showroom in exchange for a price break, he said.

Volk developed his partnership with JS Machine by first working with its representatives based in the Baltimore, he said. Representatives from China subsequently visited Volk’s plant to view its operation. 

“We showed them exactly what we were planning to do,” he said. 

Volk Packaging, which was founded in 1967, has had an average of 85 employees over the last few years and is in the process of hiring 10 more people now. 

“We just finished our 11th straight year of growth,” he said.

In 2019, the company made about 50 million boxes and had $33 million in sales. The company’s growth has been about 8% per year since 2009.

Volk attributed the company’s upswing to a strong New England customer base that’s also seeing success. 

“Especially in the last three years, we’ve seen incredible growth among some of our customers,” he said. 

Demand for boxes, he said, is an indicator of economic conditions.

“As go boxes, so goes the economy,” he said. “If people aren’t packaging things, that means people aren’t buying things.  [Box-makers] are usually the first to see the economy change, because people stop buying and then stores stop filling inventory.”

Sounds like a great addition Derek!!

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The Giving Guide helps nonprofits have the opportunity to showcase and differentiate their organizations so that businesses better understand how they can contribute to a nonprofit’s mission and work.

Work for ME is a workforce development tool to help Maine’s employers specifically target Maine’s emerging workforce. A free guide to job and career opportunities in Maine’s essential industries.

The way we do business can change in a moment. This Mainebiz podcast series features conversations with Maine business owners who found their life, their business, or their world suddenly upended in one day. 

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