Meredith-Springfield Moves Into PET Market with Two Aoki Systems

December 10, 2009

PlasticsToday.com

Extrusion blowmolder Meredith-Springfield Inc. (Ludlow, MA) has added two injection stretch blowmolding machines from Aoki Technical Laboratories (Nagano, Japan), as well as a new building. Citing greater customer interest in polyethylene terephthalate (PET), PET containers for Vermont Maid Maple Syrup will occupy half the production time on the new machines. Meredith-Springfield is the exclusive supplier for Vermont Maid, as well as the sugar-free/low-sugar brands of B & G Foods (Parsippany, NJ). The balance of the machine time will be occupied with containers for health/beauty-aid and food-packaging programs.

The company says Aoki’s proprietary Direct Heatcon technology allows the creation of very technical bottles at what is typically a lower cost.

The purchase of the 70,000-sf building in which Meredith-Springfield resides and the order for the two new PET machines was a year-long process funded by financing from TD Bank (Springfield, MA), MassDevelopment, and the Small Business Administration. TD Bank was both a lender and an agent, assisting in underwriting a tax-exempt Industrial Revenue Bond (IRB) and Small Business Administration (SBA) 504 financing. In 2002, the company operated out of a 31,000-sf building, with five extrusion blowmolding lines.