Badger Paper Board VP Chad Kravick

https://badgerpaperboard.com/

why should you replace your corrugated pallet sheets with chipboard? 
What makes v board so important? 
Can you print your logo and instructions on your corner boards? 

Check out our sponsor Orora Packaging Solutions 
https://ororapackagingsolutions.com/

https://specright.com/ 
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1329820053/ref=as_sl_pc_qf_sp_asin_til?tag=corygat

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cory-connors/

I'm here to help you make your packaging more sustainable! Reach out today and I'll get back to you asap.

This podcast is an independent production and the podcast production is an original work of the author. All rights of ownership and reproduction are retained—copyright 2022.

Transcript

Cory Connors: 0:31

Welcome to Sustainable Packaging with Cory Connors. Today's guest is Mr. Chad Kravick , the VP of Badger Paperboard. How are you, sir? Good. How are you doing, Corey? Really good. I appreciate your, your time. I know that our companies work together, so that's always fun and exciting. But let's, let's talk about you first. What, tell us about

Chad Kravick: 0:50

your background. Well I actually started in the restaurant business and I sold my restaurant late nineties, and I took a year off to go hunting and not really do anything. And then my at that time my fiance thought it'd be a good job, but got a job, . So I was standing, standing in the lake in Wisconsin, having a beer with my cousin, and I was telling him my dilemma, decided to get a job, get going, and I, he goes, you should do what I do. I'm like, what do you do? He's like, I do a. I said, what's that ? So I had, I had no idea. I mean, you don't realize it day to day. Right. But I had no idea what it meant to be in packaging. And then you know, 27 years later, you can't get out of it., right? So I was a packaging rep for Unisource in the Midwest for 16 years. So I did day-to-day packaging, calling on accounts, you know, helping them with their spend and their.

Cory Connors: 1:40

that's awesome story and very common is the, the fact that people used to say, well, what does that mean? And now the, the answer is always, or oftentimes, oh, great. Can I talk to you about this idea? Yeah, this, I've seen this new. Have you seen this new sustainable. Material that, what do you think of reusable bag, you know, things like that. The, the conversation has shifted from what does that mean to, to, whoa, this is really cool,. Chad Kravick: Yeah, My wife loves to go to Costco and we go there. I drive her crazy. We're trying to get our list done and I'm trying to forget leads, , right. And, and learn about the, I love learning about what companies have done that's innovative, you know? Yeah,

Chad Kravick: 2:31

absolutely. It's really cool to see what's happening right now. It is pretty exciting.. Cory Connors: Well, let's What, what's, what's the company all about that you work for? Well, when I was at Unisource, that's the time they started merging with Expedit and the writing was on the wall for me. Probably maybe to start looking around a little bit the owner, Badger Mark Smiley he's still a single owner of the company approached me about building a, a national distribution network for them. So we had one plant in Wisconsin. Now we have four plants nationally. We tripled our employee size. It's been a really great experience. So now I handle all sales and everything for North America, all distribution. Excellent. It's been a really fun ride. We primarily started out as a pallet sheet company doing 40 by 48 pallet sheets. Mm-hmm. Selling truckloads those outta Wisconsin. And then I started selling truckloads to ca. and I told Mark, we should build a plant in California. And he is like, we'll build the business and we'll put the plant in. I'm like, well, let's put the plant in and then we'll build the business around it. Cause I wasn't writing the checks. You know, , of course. Right. And his son Jake, his son Jake, was graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a finance degree and he had a job lined up. I went down to see if he would move to California and run the plant at 23 years old. So him and his girlfriend, now wife, with a one and a half year old daughter drove to California to open the plant and now Jake's our president. Amazing. And yeah, it's really cool

Cory Connors: 3:55

just the, the guts it takes to take a, a leap of faith like that. Well, well,

Chad Kravick: 4:01

Yeah, he's a great, great, great guy. He's not, I call him a kid, he's not a kid anymore. Right. And then we expanded down into the Dallas Houston markets and scon gangbusters the last four years for us. And then we do have that plant in North Carolina that's been there for a while. So we often

Cory Connors: 4:15

call those either slip sheets or tie sheets, , can you tell the audience what exactly it is and what the purpose it serves? Sure. And what maybe what other products that you make or supply. Yeah,

Chad Kravick: 4:28

absolutely. Well, the, the 95% of all the. A pallet sheet that goes on top of a pallet. What that is used for is to stop any kind of puncture for the bottom layer of product, you know, screws, nails splinters, whatever else. Mm-hmm.. So that's, we call it a pallet sheet. Also call the slip sheet. Yep. And then we call our, the sheets between layers of product, a tier sheet or a tie sheet that helps tie the load together. The big market that we went after when I started was that pallet sheet because a lot of plants used high volume plants, used corrugated sheets to use that for their pallet sheet, right? If you're just doing it for puncture, if it's just strictly puncture, if you try to, I have a kit that I made as a small piece of corrugated and a small piece of chipboard and a golf tea bag with golf teas in it all glued together. They give it to a buyer and they, I say, try to stick the golf tea through each of those products, so it goes right through the corrugated, pretty slick, and it has a hard time getting through the chip board, and then their light bulb turns out above their head. There's no way that small piece of chip work cannot perform that big, thick piece of corrugated, but it really does. So it's on a sustainability aspect of it. A truckload of corrugated sheets of 6,000 sheets on say, 22 pallets, right? I can get that statement amount. The sheets on two pallets and our sheets are generally, you know, 25 to 35% less per. So we're saving money for the customer per sheet. Freight is drastically reduced and warehouse space is freed up. Wow. So it's very, very very uncommon for somebody to say no to that proposition. And

Cory Connors: 6:07

do you call it Chipboard? Is that the Yeah.

Chad Kravick: 6:09

Chipboard, yes. Yeah. Paperboard. Chipboard, again, it's very in a lot of companies like Orora and, and different companies like that, they have a hard time categorizing us. Right. To be quite honest, we, we kind of are off on our own. Mm-hmm., Cory Connors: is it 40 No. Generally when I go in, I use 18 point. It's the leader that we lead with. Yeah, absolutely. Wow. Yeah, and it, it performs very well. 18 is the most commonly run caliber of chipboard. So pricing is very good, and we're the largest customer at all the mills, so our pricing is very, very good.

Cory Connors: 6:40

Yeah, we should buy, we can do anything, anything material from you for, for print,, Chad Kravick: anything point you can get on a roll. Yeah. Anything above 40, you can't roll it. So then we get into laminated sheets. We also do laminating up to a quarter inch thick. Oh, interesting. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a wild product. That's fascinating. I, I just love the space savings aspect of it. The material reduction aspect of it is, is impressive. Very sustainable choice. Totally recyclable, I assume.

Chad Kravick: 7:14

Yeah, we, everything in our plant's, a hundred percent recycled except the virgin fiber stuff that we do. We're a a food certified plant, so some food context stuff has to be virgin, but you know, the majority of stuff that we do is recycled and all of our scrap and all of our up. Goes back to the mill. So we're just buying back our product again from the mill. Yeah. Yeah. It's fantastic. Really. It's a great story.

Cory Connors: 7:37

It's it's circular and that's, that's the goal for packaging in my opinion. Right?

Chad Kravick: 7:43

Yeah. And then we do a lot of corner boards and then the investments we've made in our corner machines are incredible. The one we put in California four years ago, it was the fastest fully automated corner board machine ever made . And just the economy of scale. And what we're having issues with in all of our plants now, like everybody else is, it's hard to get quality labor in. So our, our older lines, like in Wisconsin, they're very common across the country. You have two or three people running the line, sometimes four. Mm-hmm. The new lines that we have now, they're fully automated. We have one person running 'em. So we can take those other two or three people and move them to a different spot in the plant. Cause they're great, great assets that we have already. Right. So we're able to move people around. So we had the, the new machine in California, the new one in Houston. Wisconsin's got a new line and we have a couple more on order right now. So it's been very exciting.

Cory Connors: 8:30

Even more on order, do you plan to expand to new areas or?

Chad Kravick: 8:34

Yeah, we have some, some things coming up replacing some older lines, things like that. We do a lot of down gaging. You know, back when I was doing packaging sales, it was the 80 gauge stretch film you took down to a 63 or, you know, you played, played the games that way. Yep. But the quality of these new machines and, and the quality control that we have , in production, we can take somebody from a one 40 down to a one 20 with a new quality. Incredible. So different ways to help

Cory Connors: 9:00

people save. And it's so important to continue , to innovate. I, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about print. I've, I've seen quite a bit of people using printed v board or corner boards to, to advertise or to provide cautionary information or to provide other details. Are you seeing that trend continue?

Chad Kravick: 9:21

Yeah, quite a bit. Marketing a lot, a lot of branding, a lot of logos, company names people like the maid in the USA with the American flag on it, on their, when they ship out their pallets, it's, it's sharp looking. We do a lot of caution striping . Mm-hmm. on a lot of our heavy duty board, our four 50 s that are like a half an inch thick. We do a lot of very you know, nine, 10 different colors that designate different shipping areas sometimes for customer. Oh wow. So, yeah, it's really nice stuff. The printing is a, is a big deal. I think it's a little underutilized in the corner, boards . It's commodity driven. Yeah. But some customers like to have their logo and it doesn't add that much cost. Yeah, it looks really sharp, I think.

Cory Connors: 9:57

I agree a hundred percent. And I like it when People use it for an instruction or for Right. I, like you said, identification and advertising, marketing is a brilliant idea. Do you ever have somebody, do you ever have somebody that puts a, a QR code on it? So they, it can be scanned or anything like that?

Chad Kravick: 10:17

I have not yet. But it's definitely a possibility that we can do that. Yeah. With, with no problem. Great idea. Yeah. Our badger, our badger creating line that we have, that we replace wooden crates and like ready crate with that's more potential to be a retail, mm-hmm. type of a situation that we do some higher end graphics on those. Oh. So it's pretty, pretty sharp. But those also ship plat and it's a great space savings. Cost savings, same thing. And wood's. Takes up a lot of space.

Cory Connors: 10:45

Right. And heavy. Yeah. Yeah. Very heavy and not as consistent. Yeah. Absolut, lots of, absolutely. Yes. I understand. Yeah. What can you tell us a little bit more about the badger crate? That's fascinating product.

Chad Kravick: 10:59

So if, you know, like a, a ready crate is two U channels. Correct. And it's three panels, and then three panels. And they, they mess, they put'em together to make a crate. Then you block the ends and they. As a set, right? So if you see the back of a semi-truck full of Ready Crate, it's all air When you're looking from the back of the truck. Our Badger crate is a five panel folder that ships flat, but it folds up and does the exact same thing the ready crate does. Wow. So we're taking one, one panel of product off and it ships flat. And same thing with the the warehouse space savings. If you had a warehouse that uses ready crate or wooden crates, the whole warehouse is full of c. I can get that same amount on two or three pallets on the floor. lot of extruded metals gas and oil applications, window blinds things like that. Long pieces of product that need a good beam strength and need to be shipped that way.

Cory Connors: 11:52

Excellent. Cushioning factor and, and stability factor, it sounds like. Yeah.

Chad Kravick: 11:56

Correct. And we put legs in the bottom so they can move with forklifts and things like that if they want.

Cory Connors: 12:01

Are those paper, are those like hexaco material or what are, were those made

Chad Kravick: 12:05

out of? No, it's, it's laminated sheets of chipboard oh wow. So we can go anywhere from like a 60 point up to a quarter inch thick, and then it's hinged with a proprietary hinge and it folds up and locks in nineties. It's, it's really a nice product. Yeah. It's more of a engineered solution than our commodity.

Cory Connors: 12:23

Definitely. And it seems to me that the future of packaging is more and more custom because people are realizing the stock off the shelf options are not right size and are not always as streamlined as they could be.

Chad Kravick: 12:38

Yeah. When we realizing the plant today doing an audit and they were auto placing push pull. You know, for products or they're making products for like Aldi or Kroger Meyer Foods, whatever, and they only use one tab of the push cool sheet. I was watching 'em push it around the plant. Mm-hmm. And I'm like, you don't use that side tab at all? I'm like, no, we never use that. Our customer doesn't use it either. I'm like, , why do you need it? Let's take that tab off and save that, that board square inches and get you a better product. And like the guy's like, you can do that. Yeah. Yeah. It's just a different tie. Right. You know, you can save some money and they can improve their process. So he thought that was a great idea.

Cory Connors: 13:14

Excellent. And, and now they could report that savings for their carbon footprint reduction . Yeah. We

Chad Kravick: 13:21

make, he can make the buyer look good. You know, they'll be loyal to you forever. Oh yeah. I think that's from my packaging rep background more than what I was, what I do today. But I, I still work and think as a vendor rep or a packaging rep, not a vendor, but manufacturing rep.

Cory Connors: 13:37

Sure. Yeah. It's it's so important to solve problems even, and sometimes, especially the problems they don't realize they have.

Chad Kravick: 13:46

Right. You know, I like walking through plants too, cuz I, I see things that I used to do very well and I point things out that they have nothing to. I'm like, oh, you could, you could do that over there, you know? And they appre the reps that I work with really appreciate the extra eyes sometimes, cause they've walked through that plan a thousand times. Mm-hmm. and they kind of get just, you know, tunnel vision walking through, looking at their products and then they go. So that's pretty fun.

Cory Connors: 14:10

It's easy to miss opportunities like that. Very true. Yeah.

Chad Kravick: 14:14

Yeah. We're the, I mean, we're the offensive lineman of packaging, so the only time that you ever hear our name get called is when things go. So when people buy our, our pallet sheets and things like that, I just want them to work and not have them think about it. Right. You know? But it's crazy if a pallet sheet that's getting auto placed with robots, you know, if you pick up three or four sheets and you shut that line down, it's very expensive for that company to, to lock that whole line down and go in and clean it up and start again. So we really gotta do a good, good job of doing that. We have a proprietary sheet called our Badger AP sheet for auto palletizer placement. Mm-hmm.. It's, it runs flawlessly. It's really nice.

Cory Connors: 14:52

Do you have any anything that you wanted to talk about that we didn't get to today?

Chad Kravick: 14:57

Oh, not yet. No. I think we've covered everything. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. I, I just love this industry and I love the people that are,. It's crazy how tightknit even on a national level, right? Things are, people know everybody.

Cory Connors: 15:10

Yes. Yeah. Yes. And people stay, like you said, in the industry, 27 years for you, 25 for me, it's I, I don't know what else to do. Yeah. And I don't really, I don't really want to do anything else. I really enjoy working with Landsberg Orora and working with all these amazing customers, and it's just a fantastic opportunity to be a part of the solution for the future.

Chad Kravick: 15:35

Yeah, it's very exciting. Great.

Cory Connors: 15:38

Well, thank you, sir. Thank you, Landsberg for sponsoring this podcast. Thank you. If you're listening, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode, and stay tuned for more. Thank you. Thank you.