ALGUS PACKAGING - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Inventor, Entrepreneur, Pioneer

Art Gustafson is widely considered to be the leading pioneer of today's automatic heat seal and thermoforming industry and, indeed, the father of the rotary automatic heat seal machine. As a young man, he discovered his natural talent for design and innovation working on his family's farm in Illinois. He joined Plastofilm Industries ( Wheaton , Ill. ) in 1954, starting in the die shop and subsequently moving up the engineering and management ladder. In 1961, he ventured out and started his own business (Alloyd Company) and began designing and developing his own equipment line. The new line of equipment focused on providing customers with more efficient and cost effective solutions to what he saw as gaps in the industry. As a one-man operation, he designed, tooled, fabricated and then introduced in 1966 his revolutionary six-station rotary machine, the Alloyd Model 6SCBE. It became the standard of the industry and is still in use all over the world today. In 1989, after building Alloyd to a company of over 300 employees, he sold the company. (Alloyd now operates as a division of Sonoco Corporation). Seeing a need in the industry for some new designs and concepts in packaging, Art Gustafson re-entered the industry he had so influenced in 1995 by forming Algus Packaging, Inc.