🔒Made in Maine: At Biddeford packaging company, boxes are booming

Volk Packaging made more than 50 million boxes of all sizes and shapes last year.

But you won’t hear CEO and owner Derek Volk call them cardboard. Cardboard is what cereal boxes are made from, he says. His boxes are made out of what he simply calls “corrugated,” whose multiple layers provide strength, durability and cushioning needed for shipping products large and small. While it may sound straightforward to make boxes, it’s not that simple to take large sheets of corrugated cardboard and then cut, fold, glue and print them into custom-ordered boxes.

Inside his 137,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in the Biddeford Industrial Park, Volk shows off his two newest machines, known as a five-color Apstar rotary die cutter and a four-color flexo folder gluer. Those machines and their accompanying robotics and conveyor system cost $10 million when he bought them three years ago, Volk says, but he needed modern high-speed machines to add to his assortment of older machines to remain competitive.   “I had to do this if we wanted to grow the company,” Volk says. “If I didn’t make this investment, it’d be like playing Roger Federer with a wooden tennis racquet.” Volk Packaging was founded by Volk’s grandfather and father in 1967 in a 20,000 square foot plant across the street from where the current plant is located. It has grown through the years and moved to its current location in 1997.   The corrugated cardboard itself is manufactured by NewCorr Packaging, a Massachusetts company in which Volk Packaging owns a one-sixth stake. Truckloads of corrugated sheets are delivered to Volk’s plant, where they go through the process of being turned into boxes. Volk has close to 1,000 customers, primarily in New England with small numbers in upstate New York and in Montreal. Everything Volk manufactures is a custom order. Volk’s boxes come in all shapes and sizes to hold everything from food and beverage products, industrial supplies and books to furniture, cartons of eggs and machine parts. He once made a box to hold a piano. The cost of a single box can range from four cents to $25, Volk said, depending on the complexity and volume. “If you’re making something and you need to get it somewhere, that’s where we come in,” Volk says.

Array of products

While shipping boxes make up 90% of Volk’s sales, the company’s 110 employees also manufacture display stands to hold goods such as whoopie pies, beer, apples and frozen lobster products.   Volk Packaging further diversified in 2021 when it opened a 100,000-square-foot building in Sanford that acts as both a warehouse and a fulfillment center. As a fulfillment center, the company not only makes boxes for businesses, it also fills orders and even mails them to end customers if needed. For example, Volk employees fill shoe care kits in small boxes with a shoe brush, polish, rag and other things for a shoe care company. Business has been good, with sales reaching about $50 million last year, up from about half that a decade ago. And while he has competitors, Volk promotes his company as the only Maine-owned and operated box plant. “When you buy from Volk,” he says, “all the money stays in the state.”