Company produces packaging closures for 40 years.

Weatherchemis celebrating its 40th anniversary. Weatherchem’s history reaches back to 1971 when Albert J. Weatherhead purchased Ankeny Co., a small tooling company. Since consumer products companies were moving rapidly to adopt plastic, rigid packaging containers, Weatherhead realized that Ankeny could make significant gains in the packaging industry by developing and manufacturing a value-added packaging product line, if it received the right attention and capital investment.

Forty years later, the company now known as Weatherchem is a global enterprise with 100 employees and a full range of innovative dispensing closures used in markets spanning from pet food to spices to household chemicals and candy. Today’s Weatherchem is many times the size of that original single product offering, with customers throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East and Australia.

In some segments, Weatherchem’s products are so dominant its market share approaches 60%. Weatherchem products are recognized throughout the industry and have received a wide variety of awards, such as “Best Package of the Year” (LiquiFlapper) from the Association for Liquids and Sauces in both 2010 and 2009 for its LiquiFlapper closure and the 2010 Ameristar Award from the Institute of Packaging Professionals. The company itself has been honored on several occasions as one of the region’s best places to work as a “Northcoast 99” award winner, and was chosen a winner of The Smart Business eVolution of Manufacturing Award for its production practices.

Weatherchem was an early pioneer in sustainability. The company has a long-standing and extensive sustainability initiative to reduce its own energy consumption, as well as create dispensing solutions that use fewer materials and reduced product weight. Even during the recent economic downturn, Weatherchem continued its sustainability investments, reducing scrap by 50%, installing new hydraulic presses that consumed 35-45% less energy and 800,000 fewer gallons of water annually, and installed a new “chiller” to cool interior spaces with 40-45% less energy than prior systems. Going forward, Weatherchem has set a goal to become “landfill-free.”

Weatherchem Corp. is an innovative manufacturer and marketer of convenient plastic dispensing closures and controlled access packaging. As the creators of the original Flapper® cap dispensing closure, Weatherchem now offers one of the industry's most innovative closure product lines. In addition to Flapper these include: LiquiFlapper®, NutraFlapper®, NutraGen II®, FlapMate® and Grinder NR.