I’ve had the unique opportunity of growing up in packaging and technology.  I am proud to now serve on the Board of Directors of the International Association of Packaging Professionals and the International Packaging Consultants Council after 30 years in the packaging industry.

My step-father since I was four years old, Paul Winkler, was a pioneer in the plastics industry.   His company, Winkler Flexible Products, was the first to make plastic spoons, forks, knives, and straws in the late 1950's. He was the first McDonald' supplier.  He developed the Baskin Robbins Pink Taster Ice-Cream Spoons, the Stay-Bent flexible straw, Slurpee straw, and the Spork!   I grew up loading trucks, working in our injection molding, thermoforming and extrusion plants, and developed my first sales and marketing skills before I was 15.

In 1976, my family sold Winkler/Flexible to The Coca Cola Company. At that time Coke was IBM's largest customer. In 1977, IBM's General Systems Division announced the System/34 as a low-cost approach to distributive data processing for businesses of all sizes. Centered on the IBM 5340 system unit, the System/34 used as many as eight workstations to provide timely access to current data and offered seven attachments.   This revolutionary first system was given to Coke and Coke used their newly acquired Winkler/Flexible division as its first installation.  My step-father made sure I was there for this revolutionary technology and, at 15 years, I was involved daily in the revolutionary installation and was fortunate to start honing my tech skills with leaders who became the future executives and leaders of IBM and Apple. 

My boarding school, Cate School, was Apple’s first training center in the 1970’s. In exchange for using our 250 person residential campus during holidays and summer breaks for corporate training retreats, Apple installed the first Apple system in every student room so they could use it as a training center.  As student at Cate I was part of the Apple team and was involved with the formative founders and original tech team at Apple.

After graduating I, along with my step-father and younger brothers, Christopher and Colin,  went on to co-found and develop packaging manufacturers WinCup (sold to Scott Paper in 1983), Winkler Forming (sold to Pactiv), and PWP (sold to HPC). 

Throughout the 1980's and early 1990’s, my partner, Dick Feldman (former VP Sweetheart/Fort Howard Paper) and I founded and operated West Pac Sales, the leading packaging and disposables brokerage company servicing the restaurant and club store industries.  Later, we broke off and I joined the former President of Scott Paper Company, Bob Vanderselt, and together we founded Packaging Resources. 

Today, our Packaging Resources mission is to understand all the packaging technologies, suppliers and their capabilities that have applicability to the retail and foodservice industries and, since we have no vested interest in any technology or supplier, we can objectively provide services and recommendations that are in the client’s best interest, be the client a Retailer, Foodservice Operator or Supplier.  We offer ourselves as a resource to the Retailer and Foodservice Operator’s marketing, purchasing, R&D and operations functions striving to ensure that packaging’s potential value added is thoroughly integrated into every aspect of the business.

Through our independence, packaging expertise and focus on packaging in the Retail and Foodservice industries, we are uniquely positioned to decouple packaging in a way that enables clients to identify and capture performance improvements never envisioned much less realized.

BACKGROUND

Packaging is pervasive in the Retail and Foodservice industries and impacts virtually every aspect of an Operator’s business; directly (protection, transportation, product life preservation, etc.), indirectly (space, safety, shrink, staging, in-store processing, disposal, etc.) and dual purposed (merchandising, brand reinforcement, POP, etc.).

Opportunities to utilize packaging to achieve business objectives and increase profitability are plentiful.  The key is to understand the Operator’s objectives and strategies and then be skillful in translating into packaging objectives and specifications that include both the obvious direct requirements as well as the less obvious indirect requirements.  The additional upside opportunities result from exploiting the fact that packaging is pervasive and utilizing it as a means to communicate messages, reinforce images and promote desirable impulses.

Packaging is very complex with many technologies producing many structures from many materials.  It has taken me a lifetime of service in this industry to understand and appreciate the ever evolving packaging technologies, materials and structures that are produced to support virtually every new product concept or need.  The global packaging industry is over $500 billion and over $195 billion in the U.S. alone.  It is a highly fragmented industry with thousands of competitors, full of many niches and segments and requires full time vigilance to understand and keep abreast of the alternatives available for each application.

No operator can possibly be an expert in packaging or knowledgeable about all the alternatives available or comprehend all the ways in which packaging can positively impact its business.  Suppliers specialize in a few technologies and therefore are not experts across the full spectrum and are focused, quite naturally, on their own vested interests.  Alternatively, we focus full time on this industry and specifically on the Retail and Foodservice segments.

 QUALIFICATIONS

Our experience, expertise and industry relationships enable us to understand both the operator’s and the supplier’s businesses, translate operator objectives into packaging requirements that suppliers can act upon and assist the supplier in the packaging development process.

In addition, with our independence and objectivity, we are uniquely qualified to recruit and facilitate packaging partnerships between operators and the best suppliers in order to efficiently utilize the best technologies and supplier capabilities.  Principals of ours have direct experience in Retail and Foodservice as well as in manufacturing and are skilled in general management, marketing, product development, operations, engineering and sales. 

For more information visit www.pakresource.com