Friendship Industries, Inc. is a successful, $7 million contract packaging company in Harrisonburg, VA, that provides quick-turnaround, high-quality secondary packaging services with extreme efficiency. But despite Friendship’s high-caliber output, packaging is primarily a means to an end for this company. Friendship’s main reason for being, since it was founded 55 years ago, has been to provide job opportunities and work skills development training for persons with disabilities, and more recently, for those facing barriers to workplace readiness.
The history of Friendship Industries dates back to 1964, when a group of eight young men with developmental disabilities aged out of their local high school in nearby Linville, VA, and found there were no jobs available for them. Recognizing the power of work to provide individuals with purpose and dignity, the young men’s parents joined together to form a company that could provide them with real-world work experience.
“Friendship Industries was created as a social enterprise, before such a thing existed,” explains Sandra Quigg, Director of Organizational Sustainability for the company. “It was started as a business to employ this specific demographic.”
For roughly 25 years, the company operated much like a job shop, with its first business coming from a nearby Coca-Cola plant and consisting of repairing the wooden crates used to hold its soda bottles. In the early ‘90s however, Friendship decided to focus on its core strength: contract packaging. That’s when the business really took off.
Today, Friendship, along with its non-profit affiliate, Able Solutions, employs 154 workers in an integrated environment in a 74,000-sq-ft production plant. It also offers contract packaging services for refrigerated products through a partnership with InterChange Group, a nearby warehousing and logistics firm with a 64,000-sq-ft cold storage facility.
Balancing mission with margin
