Jolly Poly

Tracing its roots back to 1957, Polytarp Products is a real-life embodiment of the simple truism that there are no short-cuts to long-term success in the plastic products industry—especially for an independent family-owned business.

That said, the Toronto-based plastic films extruder is also a compelling testament to the virtues of hard work, sharp business acumen and proactive capital investment as requisite building blocks for a thriving manufacturing enterprise that just keeps getting better with age.

Nowadays employing about 180 people at a busy 150,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in the city’s north-end suburb of Downsview, the company produces over 40 million pounds of finished plastic products per year for customers across a broad and growing range of industries covering construction, agricultural, food, automotive, healthcare, furniture, waste management and other important industrial sectors driving Canada’s economic growth and prosperity.

Specializing in producing premium-quality durable polyethylene film structures, the company’s diverse product portfolio comprises multiple types of products—from packaging to liners and films—in hundreds of lengths, widths, thicknesses and other variations to suit virtually every application in the nine key industries Polytarp serves with stellar customer service and professionalism.

“Our customer service is arguably our key core competency and competitive advantage,” Polytarp President Steve Ghantous told Canadian Packaging during a recent visit to the company’s landmark facility hosting 13 towering onsite silos holding up to 180,000 pounds of polymer resin pellets each to feed the plant’s continuous 24/7 production process.

“Nobody beats us on our service or our lead-times, which I believe are the shortest and most efficient in the business,” says Ghantous, who has just celebrated his 40th anniversary of working with the company founded by the late Paul Chitel.

As Ghantous explains, “We are totally focused on quality and service. We always look at the long-term picture.

“We have customers here whom I personally serviced when I was a sales rep here some 30 years ago,” Ghantous points out, “and that’s because we have never let them down with missed deliveries or delays.

“If someone puts in a custom order with us, we can have it on their floor within three weeks or less,” he says, “which is very rare in our industry.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s an order for a construction industry customer,” Ghantous elaborates, “or if it’s for value-added packaging of fresh meat or other perishable foods.

“Providing quick customer service is something that’s instilled in everybody’s mind at this company,” he reasons, “because it gives customers a one-stop supplier with close to a 100 per cent fill rate and a 100 per cent on-time delivery rate.”

In addition to customer service, Ghantous cites product and market diversification as another important competitive advantage that enables the company to ride out any seasonal or cyclical variations affecting a particular market segment.

As he explains, “We are diversified with your commodity products as well as our value added-products—both are just as important for us.

“It helps us to deal with fluctuations as well as the economic cycles,” Ghantous states. “So, if the construction industry slows down because of high interest rates, for example, we can rely more on the food industry or automotive industry to make up for the drop-off.

“Being diversified makes you less concerned about seasonal fluctuations or sudden changes in consumer consumption habits,” he adds, “like buying less meat because of higher prices or cost-of-living issues.”

As part of the company’s continuous drive to diversify its product offerings in recent years, Polytarp has made significant inroads into the food packaging market—primarily in the processing and food-service segments of the industry—leveraging its expertise in producing multi-layer plastic film structures that offer superior barrier protection and extended shelf-life properties by combining polyethylene with nylon, EVOH (ethylene vinyl alcohol), tie and other polymers.

“These are typically packaging products that the retail consumer will not see at their supermarkets or grocery stores,” says Polytarp’s product manager Troy McCartan, “but nevertheless play an important role in the food industry’s value chain by keeping food fresh as long as possible until it makes it to the final point-of-purchase or a finished retail package.”

Some examples of the food packaging products manufactured at the Polytarp plant include:

• The Super Polyfresh hot-fill bags and film for hot-fill packaging of liquid or semi-liquid products such as sauces, marinades, dips, salsa, soups and other acidic liquid foods requiring extended shelf-life in refrigerated conditions without the use of preservatives.
• Available in thicknesses of 2.5 mil and up, the nine-layer Super Polyfresh films and bags, along with the seven-layer Polyfresh Plus structures, can be used on both vertical and horizontal form-fill-seal machines, as well as on high-speed automated MAP (modified atmosphere packaging) equipment with gas-flushing capabilities.
• Vertical and horizontal form-fill-seal flow-wrap film. Suitable for both hot-fill and cold-fill applications, the Super Polyfresh, Polyfresh Plus and the five-layer Polyfresh flowwrap films are high-strength, freezer-safe packaging materials that can be converted into beef, pork, poultry, fish, grain and sauce pouches, freezer film, flexible packaging, dairy packaging, and other commonly used packaging formats.
• Super Polyfresh high-barrier bags, liners and film featuring an ultra-low oxygen transmission rate (OTR) that provides superior oxygen, moisture and gas barriers to help keep beef, pork, dairy products, sauces and other food fresh food fresh for longer.
• Polyfresh Gas Flush bags, liners and films, featuring exceptional seal strength to seal off oils and grease and prevent leakage, while providing superior oxygen, moisture and gas barriers for a multitude of fresh and prepared food products.
• Super Polyfresh, Polyfresh Plus and Polyfresh vacuum bags, manufactured with a strong three-way seal and tearaway notch for easy sealing and opening. Supplied in loose-packed cases for easy handling and use, the bags can be heat-sealed to protect the contents and lock in freshness of a wide variety of both food and non-food products, including cannabis, electronic components and medical devices, among many others.

While food packaging currently accounts for over one-third of the Polytarp plant’s output, McCartan and Ghantous both expect that share to grow even higher in coming years.

In the meantime, customers in the construction and home-building industries account for roughly half of the company’s production capacity—a result of the company’s unique legacy and prominence in these sectors.

As Ghantous recalls, founder Paul Chitel originally started up the company under the name of Dominion Poly Products as an animal feed business, before soon changing its focus as a distributor of protective plastic sheeting, layers of insulating foam with plastic covering, for local construction sites to safeguard their building supplies and materials from weather and other elements in outdoor environments.

“He was basically selling imported polyethylene tarps and purchased poly and foam to convert into insulated blankets. That is how the name Polytarp originated,” Ghantous explains.

“He was very successful at it,” Ghantous continues, “and as his clientele grew and he needed more polyethylene to cover the insulated blankets during the GTA construction boom, he eventually bought his first extruder and started manufacturing the poly that was required.

Purchased in 1974, that first extruder was installed inside the company’s newly-constructed manufacturing facility where it still operates to this day, albeit with plenty of more people and machinery to make its steadily growing product range.

Today ranking as one of Canada’s largest privately-owned manufacturers of flexible plastic films, Polytarp installed several more extruders at the facility during the 1980s to serve the growing customer base—achieving the construction industry’s CGSB certification for the company’s Super Six Vapor Barrier product range in 1997, while also implementing the industry’s first-of-its-king recycling program for its trim and product waste.

By mid-1990s, the company made its first foray into the food industry by commencing production of food-grade polyethylene bags and films, followed by a 1999 purchase of a first multi-layer extruder and the launch of its signature Polyfresh line of packaging products for the food industry.

Shortly after attaining the global ISO 9001 certification for quality management practices in 2006, Polytarp installed a seven-layer extruder to make high-barrier packaging for fresh beef, pork and poultry products. Within three years that line was fully operating near capacity, which made the decision to purchase a bigger nine-layer line an easy one.

In 2010, Polytarp obtained the vaunted global FSSC-22000 food-safety certification—incorporating all the pertinent HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) protocols—following that milestone with a 2012 installation of a nine-layer extruder to make ultra-high-barrier food packaging.

In following year, the plant installed three more extruders—including a three-layer and five-layer blown film lines—along with a laminator, a slitter and other converting equipment to expand its portfolio to PET and other laminate-base products.

The new three-layer extruder was purchased from Bandera, an industry leader for wider high speed production lines.

In addition to vastly improving the quality and performance attributes of its products, these multimillion-dollar investments also helped Polytarp to develop more sustainable packaging solutions for its customers, Ghantous contends, citing the company’s pending certification to the international ISO 14001 environmental management systems (EMS) certification that encompasses resource usage, waste management, environmental performance and other key sustainability criteria.

According to Ghantous, continuous capital investment is all part of life in the modern plastic processing industry.

“We bought five extruders, a laminator and slitter in the last 12 years,” he says, “representing a total investment of nearly $20 million in high-end, state-of-the-art machinery.

“We are continuously reinvesting in the food space because as the regulations continue to change, the customers keep coming at us with more complex requirements,” he points out, “and this is very much a customer-driven business.

“As the raw materials used to make polyethylene keep changing, we have to upgrade our production capabilities accordingly,” he states.

“Using the right resins and polymers to make the right film structure is like having to upgrade your computer to run the right software,” he says.

“The need for us to continuously upgrade and improve our machinery or equipment is mandatory,” he says, “and speaking with our customer on a daily basis allows us to make sure that we always stay ahead of the curve.”

In addition to large-scale equipment expenditure, Polytarp is also strongly committed to its intense R&D (research-and-development) activities, maintaining an on-site lab equipped with cutting-edge instrumentation and testing equipment and staffed with highly knowledgeable science and technology experts.

“R&D is a massive part of our business,” Ghantous states.

“We have invested heavily in our lab and its equipment because we and our customers need the flexibility to obtain a better barrier, a better seal, better material stiffness or whatever else they may want, and we have the equipment that allows us to do that.

“But it’s not just about the equipment: we have also invested heavily in our people.”

Says Ghantous: “One of our strengths is we don’t necessarily copy what’s out in the marketplace at the moment: we always strive to find out what our customer will need going forward.

“Hence, we do extensive in-house R&D and engineering with our own products, which involves a lot of ‘outside the box’ thinking,” he states.

“Whereas back in the old days we used to run two or three types of basic raw materials, today we have about 18 classes of resins alone to process, as well as a multitude of various additives, so you can imagine how important it is to have the knowledge and the brainpower to handle all that.”

Ghantous and McCartan both acknowledge the issues of plastic waste throughout the industry, they insist that a big part of the solution is the benefits that plastic packaging provides to the modern consumer society on a daily basis.

“There is no question that we as an industry have to do a better job of collecting, reusing and recycling the waste generated by the plastic industry,” Ghantous concedes, “but many of the alternative options to plastic can be vastly more damaging to the environment.

“Some paper bags have 10 times the carbon footprint of a plastic bag when you consider how much energy it takes to produce it, along with all the pollution going into the air from the smokestacks you see at all those pulp and paper plants.”

According to Ghantous, solving the plastic pollution problem requires the creation of an adequate recycling infrastructure that will accept flexible plastic waste just as readily as it does with rigid plastics.

“The biggest issue with plastics is waste: we have got to be more responsible with how we’re handling the plastic waste,” he states.

“But when you look at the more advanced markets like California and some parts of Europe, you’ll see that they have a robust recycling program set up that make it easy for individual consumers to recycle all their plastic waste,” Ghantous points out.

“Plastic is in fact the easiest-to-recycle and reuse material out there,” he proclaims, “but we have to have a national system set up to do that, which is what the federal government should be focusing on.”

Adds McCartan: “As an industry, we understand the challenges that are there, but we’re already on the leading forefront of making sure that we’re reducing the amount of waste by providing consumers the with products and packaging that our customers request.

“With food waste being a huge national and international issue, our customers can use our food packaging products to create shelf-stable, longer shelf-life materials to reduce food costs for the consumers and reduce the amount of food waste,” McCartan states.

“So that is our primary focus here: the reduction of food waste and plastic waste,” says McCartan.

“I believe that it’s incumbent on us as an industry to make sure that we’re out there leading the way with our environmental products, systems and services as required by the consumers, ensuring that we are fulfilling their needs and wants on the recyclability and sustainability side.

“Our R&D department is continuously updating and working to make sure we match our products with what our customers and the consumers demand,” McCartan concludes, “and the environmental impact will continue to be our heavy focus going forward.”