Company produces packaging closures for 40 years.
Weatherchemis celebrating its 40th
anniversary. Weatherchem’s history reaches back to 1971 when Albert J.
Weatherhead purchased Ankeny Co., a small tooling company. Since consumer
products companies were moving rapidly to adopt plastic, rigid packaging
containers, Weatherhead realized that Ankeny
could make significant gains in the packaging industry by developing and manufacturing
a value-added packaging product line, if it received the right attention and
capital investment.
Forty years later, the company now known as Weatherchem is a global
enterprise with 100 employees and a full range of innovative dispensing
closures used in markets spanning from pet food to spices to household
chemicals and candy. Today’s Weatherchem is many times the size of that
original single product offering, with customers throughout North America,
Europe, the Middle East and Australia.
In some segments, Weatherchem’s products are so dominant its market share
approaches 60%. Weatherchem products are recognized throughout the industry
and have received a wide variety of awards, such as “Best Package of the
Year” (LiquiFlapper) from the Association for Liquids and Sauces in both 2010
and 2009 for its LiquiFlapper closure and the 2010 Ameristar Award from the
Institute of Packaging Professionals. The company itself has been honored on
several occasions as one of the region’s best places to work as a “Northcoast
99” award winner, and was chosen a winner of The Smart Business eVolution of
Manufacturing Award for its production practices.
Weatherchem was an early pioneer in sustainability. The company has a
long-standing and extensive sustainability initiative to reduce its own
energy consumption, as well as create dispensing solutions that use fewer
materials and reduced product weight. Even during the recent economic
downturn, Weatherchem continued its sustainability investments, reducing
scrap by 50%, installing new hydraulic presses that consumed 35-45% less
energy and 800,000 fewer gallons of water annually, and installed a new
“chiller” to cool interior spaces with 40-45% less energy than prior systems.
Going forward, Weatherchem has set a goal to become “landfill-free.”
Weatherchem Corp. is an innovative
manufacturer and marketer of convenient plastic dispensing closures and
controlled access packaging. As the creators of the original Flapper® cap dispensing closure,
Weatherchem now offers one of the industry's most innovative closure product
lines. In addition to Flapper these include: LiquiFlapper®, NutraFlapper®, NutraGen II®, FlapMate® and Grinder NR.