Doing Packaging Business with a Bureaucracy vs an Entrepreneur

We compete with mammoth corporations. And although they may be bigger (for now), we compete and outperform in three critical areas: Ingenuity. Quality. And speed.

Injecting ingenuity

When you are doing business with a bureaucracy, they will usually do what you ask them to do. Nothing less. But nothing more. Nestlé would have lost out on a great innovation if they had gone to a bureaucratic packaging company vs coming to us. They were looking for production of their single serve ice cream containers converting from paper to plastic. Up to that time, the package was served with a small wooden spoon on the lid. Remember those? If they had gone to a bureaucracy it probably would have remained that way today. But we saw an opportunity. We engineered a way to injection mould a plastic spoon in the lid. It streamlined production. And the consumers loved it. This was not something Nestlé envisioned: it was something we brought to the table as added value. The result? Nestlé more than doubled sales projections. That’s entrepreneurial ingenuity at work.

Quality is not an option

Next to tape measures, saw blades had the greatest tendency to ‘grow legs’ and walk out of Home Depot stores. Losses amounted to $5 million annually. They needed a packaging solution to help hinder theft. That was the ask and a bureaucratic company could certainly deliver. We wanted to do one better: an attractive theft-resistant packaging solution. The solution was a sensory enabled and streamlined package container. The success of this was so great that our packaging solution was adopted not just for North America but Italy and China, as well. That’s an entrepreneurial culture of quality at work.

To market lickety-split

A critical strength of an entrepreneurial organization is its agility. We don’t lumber in bureaucracy. We move to market fast. This is especially important to smaller companies competing with the Goliaths in their category. With ingenuity and speed, you can level the playing field in many ways. We can go from napkin design to on the shelf packaging faster than any company we know of.

When Club Coffee approached with an interesting challenge we enthusiastically rose to the occasion. They had first gone to a bureaucratic packaging company who declined the project. The requirements? Create a compostable bio-resin coffee pod. We created a mould and working with the University of Guelph, tested different resin formulas. Our first meeting with the client was in December. We were in market testing in the early new year. Not only did we break ground, we broke records. That’s entrepreneurial agility at work. And the rest of Club Coffee’s competitors are still trying to catch up.

If you want agility, ingenuity and quality, you need to look at a packaging company that works like you do: quickly, intelligently and creatively. We are that company.

CEO and owner, Adam Cruickshank has packaging in his blood. Pioneering the use of robotics, creating vision technology to all but eliminate returns and establishing independent websites for each machine so that both Fourmark and its clients can monitor production remotely in real time, Adam is the ‘ingenious’ of ‘Injecting Ingenuity’. Supporting him as president is a veteran of the packaging industry, Jeff Bojeski, injecting knowledge, experience and expertise to the packaging production process