Breaking the Mold: MeadWestvaco Merges Companies to Expand Their Core Capabilities of Merging Plastic and Paper

By Ron Romanik

The name of the MeadWestvaco Corporation was born from the 2002 fusion of two companies with deep histories in paper--Mead and Westvaco. Mead was a 156-year-old company that grew out of the Mead Paper and Pulp Company, and Westvaco was a 114-year-old business that was once known as the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company.

As a result of the merger, entities such as AGI Klearfold, AGI Media, and Paxonix, identify themselves as "A MeadWestvaco Resource." MeadWestvaco has continued to bring more companies under its umbrella, at the same time selling several mills and forestland last year for $2.3 billion. The company currently operates in 29 countries around the world.

MeadWestvaco announced in February that they were relocating their corporate headquarters from Stamford, CT, to Richmond, VA, to realize cost savings and centralize their packaging businesses and management. The company as a whole has a reputation for delivering high-value packaging solutions that combine their market strengths in paper and plastic construction. The company also has market-leading positions in its business divisions, broken down into Consumer and Office Products, Specialty Chemicals, and Specialty Papers Businesses.

The move to Richmond also accompanies a reorganization of the company's packaging services into two cross-functional divisions--the Packaging Resources Group and the Consumer Solutions Group. Consumer packaging solutions are a small portion of the entire MeadWestvaco corporate story, but a part of the story that is growing globally. "This reorganization is going to bring us into very good alignment with the way our customers are set up," says Ron Sasine, v.p. of business development for AGI Klearfold in MeadWestvaco's new Consumer Solutions Group.

MeadWestvaco has grown by leveraging its strengths in paperboard into the healthcare, cosmetic, and beverage markets, then expanding its plastic capabilities with AGI Media and AGI Klearfold into entertainment and personal care products. Recent successes in luxury markets have established MeadWestvaco as a one-stop shop that can quickly take a completely new package design project from ideation, to structural design, to graphic design, to prototyping, to testing, to production, to filling, to introduction.

MeadWestvaco's core strengths produce innovations in paperboard and plastic that create strong, lightweight, and versatile packages.

The heart of innovations

Along the way, MeadWestvaco has achieved acclaim with some industry-changing innovations, from innovative closures to dose-pack compliance packaging, among many others. On the MeadWestvaco website homepage, there is a picture of a Coca-Cola filling line with the revolutionary FridgeMaster® carton.

The germination of the FridgeMaster structure, also known as Fridge Pack, was Coca-Cola's desire to encourage customers to move more Coke cans from the pantry to the refrigerator, thereby increasing availability and consumption. MeadWestvaco brought the structural concept to fruition with a combination of innovations that all contribute to the effectiveness of the package. The board material and scoring processes were perfected to handle the strain of the packaging and filling lines and function flawlessly in humid environments.

The InSight Slider package has proven to be an efficient solution for creating on-shelf differentiation.

MeadWestvaco's AGI Klearfold division has contributed to high-profile successes such as the InSight® and InSight Slider® innovations. These packages efficiently accomplish many design objectives, such as top and bottom locking mechanisms. The most recognizable InSight package is probably the line of Olay Regenerist® and Total Effects® packages. "People want things that have novelty and uniqueness to them," says Sasine. The molded plastic package end cap design of the Olay lines led to the thermoform approach of the InSight Slider.

The success of the InSight Slider in product lines like Motorola cell phone accessories and to BreathRx oral care products comes from ability to run lower volumes, have flexibility in design changes, and to gain cost efficiencies on the production line. High impact graphics are printed right on the package, and the loading process is streamlined.

Another successful pilfer-resistant, environmentally friendly, and efficient solution is the Durafold cartons that now contain HP inkjet cartridges (see Package Design, July/August 2004). Through a multi-year development process that included several manufacturing, engineering and technical evaluations, Durafold was selected as the solution to balance ease-of-use with theft resistance and operational efficiencies with environmental goals. The packages are nearly impossible to open by tearing the carton by hand, but opening with scissors is simple and easy.

Even if the package design projects do not require patented technologies, MeadWestvaco prides itself on being able to match production and filling equipment with new design ideas. They were the first in the industry to reduce downtimes significantly with servo-controlled packaging machines monitored by remote diagnostics.

Knowing what is possible in production from the beginning of the design process is an area that MeadWestvaco designers have particular aptitude for. It's a two-way street when a minor modification in a machine may translate back into design capabilities that have far-reaching applications. And even if some efficiencies are sacrificed, those might be recouped, to a degree, by achieving a proprietary structure or label shape, which is driving so much package design today.

Todd Huffman, v.p. product development, Consumer Solutions Group, explains that MeadWestvaco likes to use their expertise to look at package design and machine design at the same time. "You certainly have to look at every variable if you want to invent something that has not been done before," says Huffman. MeadWestvaco is impressive to customers because they have real design processes in place that produce innovations. "Creating that environment is a big part of what we're doing," Huffman says.

MeadWestvaco's AGI Media is a leader in entertainment packaging, developing creative multi-disc presentations.

Design libraries and forums

The MeadWestvaco competitive philosophy is one of sharing as much internal design intelligence easily and quickly within the company. A recent internal project is consolidating all past computer designs into a comprehensive online library, as well as cataloging all physical examples of designs.

The web-based computer library is tentatively named the "design connection." With this system, any employee across the globe will be able to access any of 22,000 structural designs, be able to view extensive details about each, and be able to pull up 3D models or animated renderings. Nearly all internal structural designs in MeadWestvaco are performed on ArtiosCAD (for 2D) and SolidWorks (for 3D).

Several times a month, on average, the company holds online Design Forums where a project leader invites dozens of designers from remote offices to participate. Usually, someone calls a Forum to flesh out design ideas for a current project. Rich Thibault, director of creative packaging at MeadWestvaco AGI Klearfold explains that this saves valuable time by getting past ideas that they already know don't work. "The idea is to get to the heart of the idea," Thibault says.

Thibault goes on to explain that MeadWestvaco tries to keep designers interconnected, because each category has strengths in their set of aesthetics, and specific forces in one category may cause myopic design tendencies. Keeping cross-discipline or cross-specialty lines of communication open spurs creativity and increases the speed with which they can deliver solutions. "It makes for a much larger palette," says Thibault. "It's pretty dynamic."

Having established itself as a materials, structure, equipment, and process innovator, MeadWestvaco has recently improved their graphic design expertise as well. The most recent MeadWestvaco acquisition is the L.A.-based entertainment design powerhouse, DZN, The Design Group. This full-service design and marketing company should even further expand the company's creative design services and complete the total end-to-end service they are trying to provide.

Another "MeadWestvaco Resource" is Paxonix, which provides software asset management solutions to the packaging field. The latest edition PaxPro, version 3.0, allows designers to create mission-critical, packaging-driven strategies to improve time to market. PaxPro provides tools for digital asset management, workflow and collaboration, project management, visualization and soft proofing, as well as specification management--all built on a common foundation of best practices.

Investing in the future

MeadWestvaco has a history in paper-based consumer goods such as AT-A-GLANCE®, Cambridge®, Columbian®, Five Star®, and Mead® products, and they have a long reputation of recycling initiatives. The company is committed to managing strategically located forestlands in the U.S. according to stringent environmental standards and in conformity with the Sustainable Forestry Initiative® program.

Demonstrating its success in integrating sustainability practices with core business objectives and values, MeadWestvaco was selected as a member of the 2006 Dow Jones Sustainability World Index for the second consecutive year. The DJSI represents the top 10% of the largest 2,500 companies in the Dow Jones Global Index in terms of economic, environmental, and social performance, and MeadWestvaco ranked best in class in the Containers & Packaging industry group. Developing folding bio-based plastics with partners.

The company is currently developing folding bio-based plastics for use in folding cartons. MeadWestvaco believes that these materials will provide a viable alternative to traditional cartons because of the versatility they expect in printing, die cutting, scoring, and folding the materials.

MeadWestvaco's Packaging Innovation Center in Richmond is designed to showcase the company's interactive packaging options, such as those possible with conductive inks, for a variety of on-shelf applications. The center has on display a host of security and anti-counterfeiting technologies collected under its new Centuria(tm) umbrella of solutions, and they recognize that the future of authentication may require multiple levels of security. The center is also developing fast online RFID track-and-trace systems that may soon apply tags at production speeds of 500/minute.

The Richmond center promotes the future of packaging technologies by demonstration. "It's hard to walk that into someone's office and explain it to them," says Sasine. The company plans another new research-focused Packaging Innovation Center in Raleigh, NC. This new center, to be led by Dr. Jack C. Goldfrank, will house research and development, emerging packaging technologies, material sciences, and other packaging innovation resources. Many of the resources currently in the Richmond facility will move to the new centralized center in Raleigh.

The latest news out of MeadWestvaco concerning their relocation, reorganization, and new initiatives appears to be the culmination of four years of rapid repositioning in the packaging industry since the initial merger of Mead and Westvaco. The resources now in MeadWestvaco's control should result in even more designs that are aesthetically pleasing in form, function, appearance, and efficiency.