ProAmpac dedicates new global Collaboration & Innovation Center in NY state

In a ribbon-cutting ceremony yesterday, flexible-packaging converting giant ProAmpac officially opened its new, state-of-the-art Collaboration & Innovation Center (CIC).

“This is ProAmpac’s new home for product development, rapid sample prototyping and evaluation of new packaging, as well as a training hub for customers and employees,” says Greg Tucker, founder/CEO of the Cincinnati-based flex-pack manufacturer. 

Tucker adds that the new 35,000-sq-ft CIC offers three capabilities, all under one roof, to help customers address packaging challenges:

  • The Design and Sample Lab (DASL), a customer collaboration, teaming resource that has been ideating and designing new packaging concepts and printed prototype samples since 2014. The new lab was relocated from its former home in Ohio.

  • The Packaging Lab, enabling product developers to evaluate and combine advanced materials for performance and sustainability. The lab is equipped for filling trials and testing, shelf-life studies, packaging-testing, and sizing for stability testing and pouching studies.

  • The Analytical and Physical Packaging Lab is a centralized corporate physical and analytical testing resource. Previously, this work has been done at multiple ProAmpac production facilities and is now centralized, with new testing capabilities, in Rochester. The lab holds environmental chambers for hard-to-hold testing, as well as new upgraded analytical testing capabilities including SEM, FTIR, and DCS for film analyzation.

The CIC was constructed on ProAmpac’s Rochester campus and adjoins the existing production facility in the Town of Ogden near Rochester — one of the company’s nearly 50 global manufacturing sites. ProAmpac has more than 5,800 employees, supplying more than 5,000 customers in 90 countries.

One-Stop-Innovation Center

“Our CIC is a one-stop center providing our customers with a resource that helps them address their packaging product development needs including product design, testing, graphic design and filling. I am confident this facility will help greatly reduce the time required to go from concept to commercialization,” adds COO Adam Grose. CIC is the permanent home for  LEAD ProAmpac Academy, where ProAmpac offers customers and employees twice-a-year training in extrusion, lamination, printing, and other flexible-packaging technologies, especially sustainability.