Mold-Rite Plastics: The Art of Closure

There's No Keeping the Lid on the Success of Mold-Rite Plastics

The defining moment. We’ve all experienced it: that moment after you’ve taken the time to examine the shelf, read all of the labels, studied every brand, variety, and formulation of the product you’ve sought to purchase.

Maybe you selected it because someone recommended it. Perhaps the product stood out on the shelf and you were drawn to it. Whatever the reason, it ended up in your shopping basket, you’ve finally got it home, and you’re ready to give it a try.

You remove the outer shrink-wrap or open the box. You unscrew the cap to reveal the inner seal and remove that as well. You dispense the product contained in the bottle and re-secure the closure. In this defining moment, you’ve likely decided if this packaging is going to make you want to purchase the product again, or if you’re parting ways with the product and moving on to another brand.

Shaping this moment into a positive experience is what drives the team at Mold-Rite Plastics, and keeps consumers coming back for more.

The Joy of Caps

From research, design, and engineering to marketing and sales, the Chicago-based firm boasts some of the most forward-thinking and creative minds in the packaging industry.

“I think the most exciting and rewarding aspect of this sector is the breadth of the industry,” said Dawn Nowicki, the company’s VP of Marketing and Business Development. “People don’t realize that packaging is part of basically every market, and it can be as simple and or as complex as any other product in the industry.”

The rigid plastic closures and containers Mold-Rite Plastics produces can be found in a host of markets, including the pharmaceutical, nutraceutical, personal care, food, automotive, and chemical spaces, to name just a few.

Aside from conceptualizing, designing, and manufacturing innovative lids to serve a variety of purposes, the company’s core strength is its unyielding commitment to creating customer delight.

As company President and CEO, Brian Bauerbach told BOSS, “There’s no question that the one thing that sets us apart most is our service model. It’s our ability and passion for delighting our customers with the shortest lead times, the most flexibility, and the most responsiveness.”

Meeting even the most complex customer needs with customized products in a fraction of the time it would take to get a generic product is a Mold-Rite Plastics hallmark.

“That ability to respond very rapidly with any product in any color with any liner in any quantity any day, that is truly what differentiates our company,” he added.

The Power of Consumer Choice

Today’s retail marketplaces are filled with variations of products meant to appeal to buyers looking for a somewhat unique experience. Virtually every surface of a container, including the closure, presents an opportunity to appeal to that demand.

“What you’re seeing is an incredible proliferation of product variety, and that is what really appeals to the consumer today. There’s a real desire for health and a real desire for ’I want something that I want. I don’t want just a general aspirin. I want something that’s very unique, special, and different,’” Bauerbach explained.

“You have to differentiate the packaging because you can’t see the contents. The packaging needs to sell. That plastic cap that we put on there, in many cases, carries the product’s logo and the color may differentiate the different types and variations of that product.

“All of that really lends itself to our responsive model of being able to provide that variety of packaging very quickly to the marketplace. That’s where we’ve seen our growth. It’s coming from that proliferation.”

Driving Intelligent Collaboration

The firm’s R&D efforts are based on an ISO-certified stage-gate process that encompasses in-depth strategic market research and a comprehensive review and approval process from the rendering stage through manufacturing and production.

“We start with a very collaborative effort to evaluate and research the markets that are critical to Mold-Rite Plastics,” Nowicki began. “We then gather a lot of feedback along the way as far as design iterations, voice of the customer, and feedback we can get about gaps or needs in the market.”

Proposed initiatives are ranked and prioritized to ensure that the most critical products and diverse options advance; Mold-Rite Plastics then develops those items most likely to fill a market void or to satisfy particular customer requests. The resulting products must be relatively easy to manufacture on both Mold-Rite Plastics and customer production lines.

“This process is something we’ve been evolving and investing energy in over the past few years — specifically because many companies can claim to be good at project management, and they can take a design that looks good on paper and mold it. However, at Mold-Rite Plastics, we try to design our products for efficient manufacturing also,” she continued.

Creating "Packaging Rock Stars"

From retail branding to product development and execution, Mold-Rite Plastics’ MRP University gives packaging distributors and manufacturers the opportunity to learn about the company and technical processes and products used throughout the industry. Nowicki describes the response to the program as “overwhelming.”

“Our customers will tell us they’ve never found anyone that has offered such a great, collaborative way to identify opportunities for synergy with our key customers while leaving them with the whole library of information and knowledge,” she stated. “The opportunities it generates, the brainstorming and thoughts that are collaboratively created are just invaluable.”

End-to-End Sustainability

From design and manufacture to facility management, Mold-Rite Plastics is committed to environmental stewardship. Their efforts to “do well by doing good” involve the entire team as well as customers and suppliers.

An investment in an energy efficient lighting system in their Plattsburgh, NY, plant has enabled the city’s electric company to generate power savings equivalent to powering about 186 homes in that area alone.

“Responsible packaging, as I like to refer to it, is always important, as is sustainability and just being responsible about how we engineer, design, and manufacture these products so we’re not generating waste,” CEO Bauerbach noted.

“No raw materials from our factories end up in a landfill,” he continued. “Any scrap that’s generated, any wasted product is repurposed or reused. Manufacturing in a responsible way, reducing our scrap rates, reducing the weight of the product, all of those things help us deliver a responsible product to an industry that is really looking for variety and differentiation.”

Inventive, innovative, reliable, responsive, responsible and kind—that’s the Mold-Rite Plastics spirit. And if that business approach isn’t pure genius, we don’t know what is.

"Responsible packaging, as I like to refer to it, is always important, as is sustainability and just being responsible about how we engineer, design, and manufacture these products so we're not generating waste." -Brian Bauerbach, CEO