Company History

In the latter part of the year 1970, the Board of Directors of W.A.Montrichard Ent. Ltd. made a decision to expand the company’s operations into manufacturing in order to diversify our business and become less dependent on the Transport and Service Station businesses we operated at that time. After considering many manufacturing options, it was decided to go into box manufacturing as the competition in that area consisted of only three companies, two small private companies and one large State owned company.

Print-A-Pak, the name given to our box manufacturing enterprise, started operations in January of 1971 as a division of W.A.Montrichard Ent. Ltd., with two machines, three employees and was located in a small building of less than 2000 square feet at 7-9 Wrightson Road .

Around this time, all the major accounts were being handled by the large State owned company and it was difficult to compete with them in the area of full colour printing and large volume orders because their equipment was geared to handle that type of work. Print-A-Pak therefore had to find a market niche if the company was to survive, and soon found one in the manufacture of boxes for the garment and food industries. At that time, all our printing and die-cutting was done on a Heidelberg Letterpress machine and it soon became evident that we needed to acquire an Offset Printing machine to compete in the area of full colour printing. The switch from letterpress to offset printing proved to be very successful, and this led to the acquisition of a larger single colour offset and eventually to a two colour offset machine.

This increase in our printing capacity had to be backed up and supported by additional converting and finishing machines, so it was decided to switch from the letterpress method of die-cutting to the more modern method of flat bed die-cutting with in-line waste removal. The greater volume of finished boxes necessitated the switch from hand gluing to machine gluing with the acquisition of our first gluing machine. This was soon followed by the purchase of two additional gluing machines and a window applying machine which enabled the company to produce and finish almost any style of box.

Nowadays, the majority of our work comes from the food industry and we are the main suppliers of all the major fast food operations in the country. We have also developed a market for our products in the Caribbean area and are now in the process of expanding in the Spanish speaking Caribbean.

Our company continues to grow and expand. To cater for this, Print-A-Pak became a limited liability company in April of 1993. We now employ 90 people and the size of our plant is now in excess of 30.000 square feet. It is our intention to acquire another machine next year, which will consolidate our present position as the number one manufacturer of boxes in the country.