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Walter G. Anderson Thrives on Change in An Increasingly Complex Food Packaging Market

As consumers demand more variety, food packaging production gets harder to stay ahead of—but not if the producer is as well equipped and as versatile as this market leader.

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Marc Anderson, president and CEO of Walter G. Anderson Inc, at one of three KBA Rapida 145 VLF presses in the company’s plant in Newton, IA 

Making packages for mass-marketed food products: how complicated could it be? You just set up the press to print a few standardized carton forms, and then you run and run and run until the job is done. Simple, right?

Wrong. Market fragmentation and SKU proliferation have taken a good deal of the predictability out of food packaging, obliging packaging printers to rethink many long-established production norms. But to Walter G. Anderson Inc., a folding carton manufacturer that does most of its $100 million annual volume in food packaging, more complexity means more opportunity—and the company’s choice of production solutions reflects its determination to go after the prize.


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About Patrick Henry

Patrick Henry is a journalist and an educator who has covered the graphic communications industry since 1984. The author of many hundreds of articles on business trends and technological developments in graphic communications, he has been published in most of the leading trade media in the field. He also has taught graphic communications as an adjunct lecturer for New York University and New York City College of Technology. The holder of numerous awards for industry service and education, Henry is currently the managing director of Liberty or Death Communications, a content consultancy.

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