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Flexible lines and a fixation on efficiency pack a powerful one-two punch at Toll Packaging

‘You have to think about efficiency in new ways,’ says Gerry Donley, president. This co-packer’s tactics include equipment retrofitting and finding new ways to reflect customers’ instructions in production quickly and accurately.

Pw 8672 Toll 10

Packaging for today’s demanding retailers has to meet just a few needs, says Gerry Donley, president of the Toll Packaging Group (www.tollpack.com). “It has to add value but not cost a penny more, and it has to get to market efficiently.”

Additional factors are making the challenge formidable for contract packagers to meet these needs. The leading retailers are dictating individual packaging needs from size to when and where and how the products will appear in the store. Expanding regulations and rising materials and transportation costs are also adding complexity to the equation.

“What you set up maybe five years ago is not acceptable now,” Donley observes. “So you have to think about efficiency in new ways.”

At Toll Packaging, the focus is on flexibility for keeping pace with the marketplace’s changing dynamics. Internally, the company believes that by being flexible in production and being elaborately organized to solve problems, it can achieve a 20% year-to-year sales increase as a third-party co-packer.

The company packages dry and semi-moist products for new introductions, special promotions, and seasonal demand. These products include human food and pet food. Many of the 24 production lines inside its 110,000-sq-ft plant in Gibson City, IL, are customized to create packaging forms that suit customers ranging from small start-up marketing operations to the national brands. The range of Toll Packaging’s services include vertical and horizontal form/fill/seal; carton and canister filling; nitrogen flushing; vacuum packaging; display assembly; heat-shrink label application; shrink-wrapping jug, pail, and bag-in-box filling; and blending.

Integrating all these services under one roof requires nimble operations, and Toll Packaging succeeds by focusing on two broad areas:

Customer-specific solutions. The company secures or designs equipment to fit a specific product and package. This includes retrofitting equipment.

Efficiency enhancements. A plant steering team has been put in place to improve efficiency and enhance the quality of the products that exit the facility.

Customer-specific solutions

Many product manufacturers specify multiple packaging requirements to give their product visibility on crowded store shelves. Contract packagers like Toll Packaging, whose production lines are geared up to handle these requirements, are winning the contracts to produce packages that put a tangible face on a brand.

One company with just such a product is AgriTrade International LLC. Toll Packaging had been hand-filling its Natural Harvest brand of adult-dog and cat food into premade flexible-film bags. “We got to a point where the volume of the product going through the line increased, and we needed a form/fill/seal machine,” says Phil Bray, president of AgriTrade, an exporter that provides the Natural Harvest pet food line for distribution in Japan.

AgriTrade had specific requirements for an improved package. It wanted a square, vacuum-sealed pouch with contour to give the package distinction from the smooth surfaces of conventional dog food pouches, and the appearance needed to remain consistent. Toll Packaging determined that a VPP 350/KVM-15 vertical f/f/s machine from Wolf Packaging Machines (www.wolf-pack.de) was suitable for shaping the desired vacuum pack. Toll Packaging based its decision in part on package testing conducted through Technik Packaging Machinery (www.technikpackaging.com), Wolf’s U.S. dealer. “We traveled to Wolf’s plant in Germany to validate the equipment to be sure it would provide the quality package necessary to meet customer specifications,” says Vicky Wilson, Toll Packaging sales and marketing manager.

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