According to Phil St-Cyr, for the past 10 years, since they started manufacturing in Ontario, Canada, “it’s always been in the plans to expand, and add a few facilities, to be able to better service the markets that we serve.” Their primary markets are premium products in the “better for you, health and wellness categories, usually in the food, pet food, health and beauty space.” These types of customers resonate really well with the Rootree offering and their philosophy, so as a result they have grown at a really rapid rate in Canada. The business in Canada is already 15 going on 16 years, initially as a package broker, although in 2016 became an HP customer and started digitally manufacturing flex pack pouches.

Now, 16 years into this, they’re servicing over 1,000 customers annually. When they started it was all about small businesses with short runs and quick turns. Today, they are not just dealing with the mom-and-pops; they’re working with procurement people that are ordering for larger companies in the hundreds of thousands, across multiple schemes, throughout the product life cycle.

Today, digitally printed flex pack runs are increasing in size and as the package sizes are becoming more standardized, the standard size adoption is becoming more predominant. New product runs usually start small and, if successful, the order volumes keep growing. How do you service customers across this new dichotomy of small and large customers, and still maintain the valuable human relationship? For a company that has been in digital flex pack since the early days, that’s the challenge for Rootree.