Mr Wellman, your company celebrated its fiftieth anniversary last year. Can you tell us something about the early years?
My father, John worked in technical sales at various large industrial companies, including DuPont, and acquired a specialist’s knowledge of plastics. Born into an entrepreneurial family in the food industry, he wanted to build his own company, and in 1973 he took the plunge, buying a small factory and an injection moulding machine. His business concept then was to provide “rapid” prototyping, with low-cost tooling and short runs to aid innovation. From today’s perspective with 3D printing, it was an excellent idea but ahead of its time.
How did he react to that?
John changed his strategy and accepted orders as a custom moulder. We moulded everything from elevator buttons for Otis and battery boxes for Exide Technologies to industrial fasteners – but also caps and closures. After taking over another moulding company doing caps, this area quickly became significant, and eventually it was decided to split the company into two divisions – one producing closures for fast-moving consumer goods, then mostly for food, household and personal care, and one for industrial products.
When did you start at the company?
As a child in a family business, you naturally come into contact with and learn the operation very early on. An early memory of “working” in the factory was around 6 years old, but I’m sure my father’s recollection of “the work” would be a little different! However, I was interested and learned a lot about injection moulding and manufacturing technology at a young age. By around twelve, I was working independently around the machines, including mould changes. Although everything pointed to engineering, I studied finance and qualified as a Chartered Accountant with PricewaterhouseCoopers, eventually working in management consulting. When my father signalled he might sell the company in the late 1990s, that’s when I joined, and we arranged a buyout programme. I spent my days back in production, re-learning the trade, and my nights taking care of sales and administration. Eventually, it became clear that our food-grade-closure business was no longer compatible with the industrial products, so we decided to split them out.
How did that happen exactly?
I took the packaging side forward and completely restructured the company around it. In 2001, we built a new production facility in Ingleburn to meet the modern requirements of the food industry, including ISO9001 and ISO22000 quality certifications. We stepped up in the value chain and pivoted from being “just a moulder” into a producer of proprietary closures and packaging. We became experts in the field of plastic packaging, building on our rich technical history in the industry, and I expanded our offer to include in-house packaging design and development. We would proactively take a packaging category and develop alternatives to existing formats, and then pitch them to brand owners. I now hold a reasonable portfolio of patents and design registrations. So the days when our company was limited to producing predetermined packaging were over.
What does your company look like today?
Today, we are long standing partners of well-known international and national FMCG brands in food, beverage, household care, personal care and pharmaceutical. We design, manufacture and distribute rigid plastic packaging, including injection-moulded caps, closures, thin-wall packaging and PET preforms – as well as ready-blown bottles via both extrusion and two-stage stretch blow moulding. Our services cover the entire process from packaging advice to and tool designs to production and finishing. We are now in one of the top five packaging suppliers in Australia. In recent years, we have become a pioneer of environmentally friendly packaging and have already won significant innovation awards for ultra-lightweight packaging and the use of recycled plastics.
Which markets are you active in?
Wellman Packaging is primarily active in Australia, with some exports to New Zealand and the rest of Oceania. Since the transport of ready-blown bottles ceases being economical beyond a certain geographical distance, our bottle customers are concentrated around our plant in New South Wales. On the other hand, we produce caps, closures, thin-wall packaging and, of course, preforms for customers all over. Less than 10 per cent of our output is exported, but we also license our technology and product designs, which is an exciting business area for us.
Your customer list reads like a who’s who of well-known brands, and some of them have been around for many years. How did you manage that?
I think it’s a given for a high-end supplier working with global brands to deliver best-in-class products with perfect quality and at 100 per cent DIFOT performance. It takes more than this. I think the keys are demonstrating vision and leadership, building collaborative relationships, and enhancing brand equity through innovation and excellence. Otherwise, we are big enough to make a difference, but small enough to fit into a client’s family. Flexibility is also important in Australia, as volumes are small by comparison to Europe, but the demand for sophistication remains.
How does that work, specifically?
Our philosophy at Wellman is to support our customers beyond the actual product, looking at their entire supply chain and how to improve it. We travel widely, which helps inform them about global packaging trends and innovations that we have encountered, and we give them tips on how packaging can be made more consumer- and environment-friendly. At Wellman, we feel responsible for the entire packaging process, not just its production.
Wellman is now pursuing its vision of a circular economy and has launched the E-ZEROTM label. What’s the philosophy behind it?
Let me share a little story about this with you. My eldest daughter is studying physics and mathematics in Norway, and a she got really involved with cleaning up ocean plastic waste, which remains a hot topic. So for her birthday, she asked her friends and family to donate to the clean-up instead of giving her gifts. Obviously a proud father moment, but also a wake-up call that we are accountable to her generation for what we do. We are all custodians of our planet, and it’s our duty to hand it over to future generations in better shape than we found it. This led us into our “Future Thinking for Sustainable Plastics Packaging” programme, including the E-ZERO™ label.
What can you tell us about E-ZEROTM?
E-ZEROTM is a vision for holistic sustainability that aims to be better than carbon-neutral by re-engineering every individual element of the FMCG supply chain to deliver environmental dividends when taken as a whole. It goes beyond the plastic, the packaging and the finished consumer good, with the objective of having a net positive impact, or at least no impact, on the environment. A key theme is energy conservation in all its forms. One example is using plastics packaging for carbon sequestration. It is an ambitious mission, but discussions with selected brand owners to date have been very positive, and this makes me confident that we might realise this vision in the not-too-distant future.
You are a pioneer in the processing of recycled PET, for which you’ve already won several awards. What motivated you to make the switch?
When the public was shocked over images of plastic waste in the oceans, they declared plastic was the villain, which I think was really useful as a change agent, so an opportunity to drive innovation. We had already worked on sustainability projects with key customers for almost two decades, including rPET trials, and have since converted almost 100 per cent of preforms to recycled PET. The topic remains a prominent one for all of our customers, but I would say that right now momentum is being lost, as consumers and social media are less vocal, and without this we will see a default back to price as a barrier to rPET, especially under price pressure from dominant retailers.
What difficulties must be overcome so that rPET can be used on a large scale?
The biggest challenge obviously remains the availability and price of rPET. Here, it is vital that the significant global investments in the recycling infrastructure continue. Unfortunately, Australia is far behind Switzerland when it comes to plastic collection and recycling. We have a similar federal organisation but, unlike Switzerland, we have been unable to find a universal and comprehensive solution. However, sustainability needs to be considered more broadly than just converting to PET and using recycled rPET.
Can you explain, please?
If you take as the key figure the entire CO2 footprint of packaging across the entire cycle of production, use and reuse, there are various ways of reducing carbon emissions, depending on the application. For example, an organoleptically sensitive water application might be best served using virgin PET, especially if this allowed the blow-fill line to run bottles that are 50 per cent lighter and 30 per cent faster, and with higher quality – the bottles then also providing the necessary top-up of virgin polymer into the system. So the carbon footprint is holistically smaller. With our E-ZEROTM vision, we intervene even more deeply in the end-to-end process, which is more complex than simply putting a “Recycled” label on a product.
In 2010, you entered the preform business with Netstal and Otto Hofstetter. Why did you choose Swiss technology?
Let me back up briefly. My father became interested in PET in the 1970s, so the topic had been interesting for a long time; however, in the early days it was a tightly controlled and licensed market. Around 2008, an approach came from one of our key customers, Colgate-Palmolive, for preforms in three sizes, twelve colours and a total annual volume of less than fifty million preforms. This was complex with respect to the frequent mould, insert and colour changes – and not suited to the mainstream PET bottle or preform supplier. Husky, Krauss-Maffei and Netstal/Hofstetter were considered as possible partners but, in the end, the Swiss duo won. We already knew Netstal and Hofstetter for the excellent quality and durability of their products. The decision came down to the lowest total cost of ownership over a lifetime rather than initial investment cost – which I suspected then and know today went in favour of Hofstetter & Netstal because we thought that they had the most efficient and sustainable solution over time. There was also a strong cultural alignment – even today, the people who were involved in our project at Hofstetter and Netstal, who built the machines and the moulds – are still there taking care of us. This history together and accumulated knowledge is priceless.
What do you value about your mould partner from Uznach?
We get extremely high-quality preforms from our Otto Hofstetter moulds, and consistently over a long time. The moulds are easy to work with and maintain and very robust. They really do reflect the Swiss reputation for quality. The people at Otto are excellent, and I have greatly appreciated their loyalty and support of our growth. They bring a personal commitment and willingness to help and have always shared their extensive knowledge with us openly. That helped enormously, especially at the beginning when we started making preforms for the first time.
To what extent is it an advantage for you that Otto Hofstetter AG is also a family-run company, like Wellman?
Since we are a family business ourselves, this fact is of course very welcome. I find the associated independence to be an important advantage. We continue to develop innovations and need reliable partners to implement them. Confidentiality is guaranteed. Plus, Otto Hofstetter is not part of a big group, and its owner gets involved, so it is easy to feel assured about continuity and doing business together. I think we have very similar business philosophies and a good understanding of each other, which helps a lot.
How do you see the future of plastic packaging worldwide?
Despite the weight of naysayers, I think the future for plastic packaging is very bright actually. The polarising discussions about plastics, especially in context of global food waste, will eventually give way to reason and the factual account of its versatility, processing properties and recyclability. If society as a whole recognises the full potential of this material, we might see “sustainable plastics packaging” holding the key to the carbon problem. If so, our industry will become even more interesting.
Mr Wellman, thank you very much for this interview. We share your wishes that your daughter can one day inherit a healthy planet.
