Huhtamaki

Huhtamaki is a paper product fabrication company founded in Finland, with several plants in the U.S.  We toured the DeSoto facility, which primarily made fountain drink cups, coffee cups, and ice cream containers.

Huhtamaki primarily fabricates the items listed above, but also collects their industrial waste paper from all over and uses them to make the Chinet product line. In addition, they have their own shop for machining parts for all of their custom manufacturing equipment.

Huhtamaki supplies an insane list of customers including Burger King, McDonald's, Costco, sysco, Ben & Jerry's, Kroger, and many others. Our tour guide said "If you've used a paper cup in Kansas recently, it was probably made here."

While the primary material utilized by Huhtamaki is paper, they also used adhesives, clay, "commodity plastic resins," metals, and engineered plastics (like UHMW and Polyacetal) for their machine shop.

Huge rolls of paper with varying thicknesses are unrolled, cut to size, rerolled and stored for the next step of production. A roll for a given product is then coated in a microfilm of clay to prevent print failure, printed on, coated in a microfilm of polyethelene on both sides, dried and cut into sheets which contain the blanks for various products. These blanks are die cut, and then fed into machines which form, glue, press, and roll them into the correct shape. they are then hand packed into plastic sleeves, which are then put into boxes and stacked for transport.

I was not super excited to visit a company that makes paper cups, but I must say I was impressed with the level of technology used, the amount of human work that was still involved, Huhtamaki's environmental mindfulness, and also the general quality of the tour. Everything was explained in detail and questions were answered thoroughly starting with the presentation on the materials of packaging  and products that encompassed far more than just Huhtamaki's processes.