MEMBER PROFILE

Forest Packaging: Quality, American-Made

BY STEVE YOUNG

Photos courtesy of Forest Packaging.

Forest Packaging's leadership team, from left: Dean DeGroot, sales manager; Greg Kula, president; and John Kula, vice president. Not pictured: Jeff Kula, senior account executive.

There’s something all-American that rings true about every independent converter’s story: an entrepreneur with a dream; a 15,000-square-foot space; a couple of pieces of used equipment; a handful of loyal customers; and a few hardworking employees. So it was for John Kissock, who in 1966 founded Forest Packaging in the Chicago suburb of Forest Park, Illinois.

One of Kissock’s hardworking employees in the company’s early years was Greg Kula, who joined Forest as a sales representative in 1980. “We were really, really tiny. We had a 15,000-squarefoot building, a crackerjack Langston letterpress from 1918, a Thompson die cutter, and a slitter,” Kula recalls.

As things turned out, Kula in 1991 bought the company from its founder, recognizing the same opportunities as Kissock—small quantities, fast service, and longstanding relationships can build a very successful business. “John Kissock had no heirs and no one interested in the business,” Kula says. “It worked out good for him; he got everything he wanted. And it worked out good for me.”

Today, 56 years after its founding, Forest Packaging, now in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, is a thriving sheet plant serving the Chicago area from 65,000 square feet of production and warehouse space. The company’s 50 employees work in two shifts to produce 130 million square feet of corrugated containers and displays annually. Now on its second generation of ownership, Forest Packaging is planning its next phase of expansion and growth.

First Years

Those early years were full of challenges. The company had a stable of loyal customers but did not have the capability to meet all their growing demands. “We needed to speed up our processes,” Kula says. “We had a lot of antiquated equipment; we had to do a lot of farm-out work.” Equipment was not the only obstacle, however. Kula remembers the frustration he experienced with the physical plant of the company, which had relocated to Addison, Illinois. “We were so locked in the smaller building,” he says. “We just needed to get a larger facility and more capability, even in the standard things—die cutting and making simple RSCs. We were very inefficient.”

Forest Packaging’s second generation— Vice President John Kula and Senior Account Executive Jeff Kula—have been the catalyst for the company’s growth in the past 20 years. Greg gives John the lion’s share of the credit for the progression of the company’s machine additions and equipment capabilities. “John’s educated himself,” says Greg. “Since he was 12 years old, he’s been sitting on forklifts, so he has a knack for production.”

The company’s current equipment roster has evolved over a 25-year period, with the most recent acquisitions in the past decade. Forest Packaging has as its workhorse machines a BW Papersystems 66" x 118" three-color rotary die cutter; a Tecasa 50" x 111" two-color flexo folder gluer; and a Maramatsu 40" x 55" flatbed die cutter. Complementing these are an Automatän 7780 laminator, a Post 1080

COMPANY: Forest Packaging

ESTABLISHED: 1966

JOINED AICC: 1991

PHONE: 847-981-7000

WEBSITE: www.forestpkg.com

LOCATIONS: Elk Grove Village, Illinois

OWNERS: Greg Kula

specialty folder gluer, and a BCS (now Kolbus) Boxmaker.

According to John Kula, the evolution of the company’s current equipment mix begins in 2010, with the acquisition of the Post specialty folder gluer. Says John: “You go back to 2010, we didn’t have a specialty gluer; we couldn’t buy a new one, so we went out and found an 10-year old Post 1080. It was in a WestRock plant in New Jersey. They had three of them that they were running, and then they lost the business. Two of them were just sitting there.”

The machine was not, however, in working condition. Says Greg: “I remember going out to see this thing. It was all in pieces; there must have been an inch and a half of dust on this thing, and I thought, ‘Oh, no!’ But it was a good price!”

The machine required about $100,000 to rebuild. “We wanted to make sure we didn’t bring something in here with bandaids on it,” says John. “We rebuilt it from front to back—drives, shafts, and belts.”

As John explains, the capabilities of the newly acquired Post exposed certain weaknesses in the company’s upstream processes. “We weren’t designing things properly,” John says. “We’d do things and have problems and end up farming business out. So, we ended up getting the Post, and that systematically changed the way we design things.”

Adds Greg: “It was [the] best thing for our designers. We always designed around difficult gluing applications, and it hurt our business. We went from zero to really busy in a relatively short time.”

Just the Beginning

The Post addition had further ramifications, as John explains. “Then we upgraded our design department because now we could start doing things. We could add more work to our die cutter. So, we ended up with a used piece of equipment that opened up a lot of opportunities for us.”

From that point, the equipment acquisition dominoes began to fall, with John seeing a need for a new label laminator with production speeds fast enough to accommodate growth and take advantage of opportunities in those customers with higher-end packaging requirements. “We found an Automatän sitting down in Texas,” John says. “But the bones were good. We bought the machine, brought it in here, and rebuilt it on the floor.” Prior to this purchase the company could label, but not quickly enough to satisfy customers.

The need for new equipment continued to manifest itself. Although the company acquired a new Tecasa flexo folder gluer in 1997 for its longer runs—and that machine had long proved its value—its two aging flatbed die cutters could not keep up with demand. Working with Hitek Equipment, Forest Packaging acquired a new Maramatsu flatbed die cutter in 2017 to increase speed and enhance employee safety, which was a top priority. “The Maramatsu—the ease. You could almost bring a person in off the street and run it,” John says. “It’s a neat piece that started helping us.”

That same year it also acquired a new Kongsberg CAD table and added a BCS (now Kolbus) Boxmaker to the production floor. According to John, the Kongsberg table enabled the company to provide better-quality samples to customers: “It’s another way we enhance our service overall,” he says.

The BCS Boxmaker, for its part, allows Forest to take smaller runs formerly run on their high-speed rotary die cutter and move them to the Boxmaker. “This guaranteed the small jobs that built Forest Packaging would still be managed while opening up capacity on the rotary die cutter for our larger jobs,” John says.

And, in what John calls “Forest’s crowning moment,” in 2018, the company added a BW PaperSystems 66" x 125" three-color rotary die cutter and Geo. M. Martin stacker. About the die cutter, John says, “That 66" x 125", I don’t think we were three months in, and we said, ‘How did we ever get along without it?’ It was that instant. You can just see the amount of stuff going through it.”

To keep up with the throughput on the BW PaperSystems die cutter—and to address the growing shortage of labor—Forest Packaging installed an Alliance Machine Systems pre-feeder at the front end of the machine in 2021. “A labor shortage made finding employees increasingly difficult,” John says. “The pre-feeder allowed us to continue to serve our customers without worry.”

Being very pleased with the performance of the Alliance pre-feeder on their rotary die cutter, the company recently added a second unit at the front end of its Tecasa flexo folder gluer. “The pre-feeders have decreased employee fatigue, increased employee safety, and increased our efficiencies,” reports John.

And in November of this year, building on the push to increase throughput, Forest Packaging will add a Geo. M. Martin bundle breaker at the back of the BW Papersystems rotary die cutter. “We’ll start designing differently now to run multiple outs,” says John. “There are jobs we’ve lost because they wanted to have it bundled, and you can’t bundle 100,000 by hand!”

In sourcing equipment, the Forest Packaging leadership team found it important to favor machines built and serviced in America, and in their view, the supply chain issues of the past two years have proved this to be a sound philosophy. “Through all our equipment additions over the years, we have found it to be increasingly important, especially in today’s crazy world, that the machines are made and/or serviced within the United States,” John says. “Our mentality is to buy American to support jobs here.”

More Capabilities, More Market

Forest Packaging’s equipment investments have tracked the growth of its diverse customer base. The large Chicago corrugated market area is, as Greg Kula says, a “good” market. “You’re not just tied into