We are excited to announce a $25M expansion to grow our Holland facility and add on-site corrugating capabilities. This expansion will add 65,000 square feet to our existing facility along with more than 60 jobs in the coming years.
“Our family has been in the corrugated business for 60 years now,” said Coastal Container CEO Brent Patterson. “In these past couple of years, Coastal Container has seen tremendous growth, which allows us to make this expansion to better serve our customers and community.”
Our family-owned company will invest the majority of the expansion funds in a state-of-the-art 110” Fosber corrugator ($16M) and new honeycomb equipment from GTW ($2M) with the remaining funds earmarked for building and railroad construction ($7M). We expect construction on the building will be finished in early 2023 with equipment purchases and installation complete in mid-2023.
New Equipment, Reduced Environmental Impact
The new equipment will introduce in-house corrugating capabilities and expand our current honeycomb capabilities. As one of the fastest and largest corrugators in Michigan, the on-site corrugator will bolster the company’s resilience to supply-chain disruptions, putting us in control of our own supply of materials.
Reduced environmental impact and capacity were the primary reasons we selected the corrugator. The machine has the capacity to run over two billion square feet of material per year and utilizes Fosber’s Syncro technology to support the latest in Industry 4.0 innovation through data collection, reporting and optimization.
The construction of a new rail spur will allow us to receive our raw material in the form of rolls instead of corrugated sheets. A single delivery of seven rail cars will replace approximately 48 truck loads of sheets. We estimate that this will eliminate the consumption of over 150,000 gallons of diesel fuel and over 1,000,000 miles of truck traffic from our roads per year. “Our environmental footprint and sustainability are key elements to our business,” said Patterson.
Growing Our Team
To support these expanded capabilities, we will also add dozens of new production and salaried positions. We expect to post entry-level production positions with full benefits packages and pay averaging $21-30/hr as equipment is installed. Partnering with us in this expansion, West Michigan Works and Grand Rapids Community College will provide on-the-job training and education for our new team members in addition to training from the equipment supplier.
“Companies have a lot of choices for paper and corrugated products at large corporations,” said Patterson. “This expansion positions us as the only locally owned and operated company in the region who can make corrugated on-site, build packaging and provide this level of control over our product quality and process.”
“We’re thankful for the partnership of MEDC, Lakeshore Advantage, Capital for Compassion, MDOT, Semco, Holland BPW and the City of Holland,” continued Patterson, “along with our loyal customers whose support has made all of this possible.”
