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Touchdown! Summit scores big in co-packing arena

A play-by-play of Summit Packaging Solutions’ path to creating an end-to-end supply chain business that meets co-packing customers’ needs for speed, customization, and a single-source supply.

Summit Executive Vice President – Packaging Joe Jaruszewski
Summit Executive Vice President – Packaging Joe Jaruszewski

Summit Packaging Solutions is fond of football metaphors: Its account managers are “quarterbacks” for the jobs they handle, Summit has its “head in the game,” and the company likes to have subject-matter experts and seasoned executives “on the bench” waiting to join the team.

Its fondness for football jargon is only to be expected. Summit’s CEO, Adam Walker, is a former NFL running back and was a member of the 1994 San Francisco 49ers Super Bowl XXIX championship team. But it’s not just the head coach’s sports background that inspires the football comparisons, explains Summit Executive Vice President – Packaging Joe Jaruszewski. Even more than that, it’s the culture of teamwork that Summit works to cultivate, both internally among its own employees as well as externally with its suppliers and partners.

Headquartered in Atlanta, Summit was founded in 1984 in Colorado Springs as Summit Container Corp., offering design and engineering of ESD (electrostatic discharge) protective packaging through five facilities across the U.S. In January 2014, 127 Summit Holdings, led by Walker, purchased the company with the intent of expanding its services to become an end-to-end co-packing supplier.

“The reason Summit Container was attractive was that it was a packaging-centric business,” says Jaruszewski. “It not only gave us design and engineering capabilities, but it also gave us an immediate footprint across the United States through which we could leverage contract packaging services.”

After improving the infrastructure at Summit Container, Summit acquired two established co-packers—Berkeley Contract Packaging LLC and Quality Associates, Inc.—to expand and diversify its services. During this time, Summit also launched a third division in cooperation with the Packaging Distributors of America that offers packaging supplies, equipment, and services.

Summit stats

For a newcomer, Summit has an incredible co-packing footprint. The company now operates 13 facilities across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico that together encompass more than 1 million sq ft of space, and it employs 450 full-time staff as well as up to 1,600 temporary employees on any given day.

Summit’s customer base is very diverse and boasts many Fortune 500 companies. Summit Container works primarily with cable and telecom companies, providing them with custom-designed and assembled protective corrugated packaging. Among them are companies such as Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Verizon, and others.

Summit Packaging Solutions works with customers from the food and beverage, healthcare, automotive, consumer goods, health and beauty, fragrance, and technology markets. Says Jaruszewski, its services cover virtually every aspect of secondary packaging. “Any type of package that you see on the store shelf that requires secondary packaging we can produce,” he says. This includes high-speed shrink wrapping and banding, bagging, blister packaging, over labeling, compact and kit assembly, RF and fin sealing, trapped blisters, pallet programs and club packs, carton packing and sampling, unsupported print-register bundle wrapping, steam- and heat-shrink banding, and PDQ and floor-stand assembly.

Within months of acquiring Berkeley, Summit relocated the company’s operations from an 82,000-sq-ft plant in Kennilworth, NJ, to a new 200,000-sq-ft facility in Monroe Township, NJ. Says Jaruszewski, the expansion streamlined the flow of product through the plant and has allowed Summit to be considered for co-packing jobs that Berkeley could not handle in the past due to limited space.

Summit’s stable of equipment is equally impressive, with enough machines to occupy 60,000-sq-ft across its 13 plants. At the Monroe Township plant alone, there are more than 25 blister trapping machines that run consistently over two eight-hour shifts per day. Each of Summit’s facilities is furnished with the same equipment, allowing customers that serve many geographic areas to have finished goods delivered in near real time—a strategy referred to by Summit as its NearCustomer production program.

If equipment is not available in a plant where it’s needed, Summit will ship it from another plant. “We have an enormous amount of equipment that is ready to go as customers require,” says Jaruszewski. “In this business, it’s about knocking down barriers—geographic barriers, equipment barriers, and system and procedural barriers.”

Summit’s acquisition of Quality Associates added embedded services to the company’s portfolio, with Summit currently working within two Procter & Gamble sites to supply one-third of its direct-to-market displays. This includes packaging material procurement, assembly and stocking, and delivery of finished goods to 3PLs.

The third leg of the Summit stool is its supplies division, which offers tape, adhesives, business wrap, industrial paper, polybags, safety equipment, and janitorial supplies through PDA’s 27 members. “When we have a customer that is in seven states, they can either go to a very large company for their supplies or they can plug into our resources with the PDA and allow us to meet their needs from an equipment, service, or packaging materials standpoint throughout the country,” Jaruszewski explains.

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