Breaking the Barrier: An Emerging Force in 9-Layer Film Packaging

In business for more than 37 years. Growth every year for more than 37 years. And now taking its three pillars of success — loyalty, quality and personal attention — to the highest end of the flexible film market: nine-layer barrier structures for food packaging.

Founded in 1986 by Harshad Shah, Hamilton Plastics Inc. sits near the banks of the Tennessee River, in Chattanooga, in a 300,000 square foot plant on 20 acres. Owing to Shah’s background, Hamilton Plastics has from its inception brought an R&D focus to the manufacturing of blown film. Still family-owned and operated, Shah, who came to America in 1974 with $8 in his pocket,  earned a polymer chemistry degree 1977 while working in the labs of Owens Corning, then joined Union Carbide in Chicago in its Glad trash bag research and development group.

Shah was there during the industry’s shift from LDPE to LLDPE. Shah earned his proverbial 15 minutes of fame by working on formulations Glad used as part of a series of TV commercials aired during the 1980s featuring Happy Days actor Tom Bosley. “Linear low-density PE was just coming out, and we had an edge at Union Carbide because we were vertically integrated on the resin side,” Shah recalls.

Shah continued at Union Carbide designing screws and dies, tweaking formulations, running film on the lab line and testing samples on various laboratory equipment. He then took a job at a privately held film processing operation in Georgia in the early 1980s, running what was at the time cutting-edge, five-layer barrier structures. 

He recalls, “The company I was with at the time lacked the expertise and experience to run nylon and EVOH, so I developed a structure for bacon packaging. Then I was challenged by a major company in the medical market to develop a product using a resin less expensive than nylon, so I developed that structure, which the company took to several of its other plants. I spent a lot of time working with the sales manager and his team working on solutions for their customers. Over time, this company added a lot of capabilities and a lot of products, including heavy-duty bags for poultry and agriculture.”

In just two years, though, that company was sold. Shortly before that, Shah got a call from an outside lab he was using in Midland, Michigan, saying that the lab was for sale. Recalls Shah, “I thought I had some abilities as an entrepreneur, so I bought it. I drove from Georgia to Michigan, with a Mazda pulling a U-Haul, picked up the equipment, turned around and drove straight back. I found office space for $150 month, put in some countertops and cabinets, and started a barrier testing and consulting company called Bartec.”

But Shah didn’t leave his former employer holding the bag. While getting his own business off the ground, he also stayed on at the former plant working two days a week and training his replacement.

Around that time, at the suggestion of a client at a major brand, Shah began to look into the market for high-molecular weight, high-density PE bag production. As it happens, this client was doing some test work on HMW-HDPE film production, only to have its board of directors vote against the pursuit because both the material and machinery technology had to be sourced overseas. Shah says, “My contact told me, ‘This is a great opportunity for somebody. With HMW-HDPE, you can reduce thickness by 1/3 and offer three times the puncture resistance, and do very well. We would have been the first one to do it, but our board turned it down.’”

Shah responded by getting into the film processing business by founding Hamilton and buying a line to make HMW-HDPE can liners. After some initial skepticism and concerns about the HMW-HDPE liners splitting, his business quickly gained traction, as his 0.75-mil bag was performing just as well as LDPE liners twice as thick. Within a year, Shah’s business grew to four lines, all from Kuhne (since replaced by Kiefel/Reifenhauser lines), selling bags through distributors. “Our first distributor was one of the skeptics,” Shah recalls. “He told me he’d take four skids, but would not pay anything up front. He said if the bags failed I had to come and pick them up. I agreed. Within two weeks he came with a truck, backed it up to my dock door and said ‘fill up that whole thing.’”

This distributor then took Shah on a weeklong sales trip throughout Alabama and Tennessee, and by the time he returned to his plant he was sold out. The K Show in Dusseldorf was held that year, so Shah took a trip to Germany three months after starting and invested in his fifth line. In the mid-1980s, the market for HMW-HDPE can liners and bags took off, and Shah then introduced the film technology to other applications, starting with box liners for poultry. He then expanded into three-layer coextrusion when the opportunity arose to make FDA-approved gas flush bags for poultry, which necessitated an investment into a coextrusion line and a relocation to its current plant in Chattanooga.

In short order, Shah grew the business by adding new applications, among them bags used to ship carpet, replacing a 2-mil LDPE structure with a 0.75 HMW-HDPE one. He then added another line and started producing laminating film, a market in which Shah says Hamilton holds a 60% share. This necessitated a shift in capacity from can-liner production.

Back to the Barrier Roots

As Shah notes, the growth of his business happened quicker than he’d ever imagined. Then it dawned on him: “I should be looking at seven- or nine-layer barrier technology, which I consider my greatest area of expertise and background.” So, in 2019, Hamilton Plastics bought its first nine-layer line, furnished by Macchi. “We started producing film, and not a single pound was ever returned for a quality problem of any kind,” Shah says. “But our customers started asking, ‘What is your backup if the line goes down?’ I didn’t have a backup, so I bought another one.”

Both nine-layer lines were commissioned under the supervision of a team lead by Guru Shah, a Vanderbilt graduate, Hamilton’s vice president and son of its founder. Each line features nine extruders, with each layer being feed up to four ingredients each for maximum flexibility and to ensure the recipe is tailored precisely to customer requirements. Films can be produced at widths ranging from 10 to 74 inches on thicknesses from 0.4-8 mil. Roll diameters are available up to 48 inches on 3-inch or 6-inch cores. Automatic gauge control provides 2 sigma thickness accuracy to 3%. What’s more, the line is furnished with next-generation width-control technology that ensures consistent and precise width measurement down to 1/8-inch on rolls as wide as 74 inches.

All components of the line are monitored and measured using HMI, PLC and air-conditioned drives to ensure each roll meets the specification. The lines can run up to 1,000 pounds/hour. With the installations, Hamilton Plastics now has 29 lines at its plant, 19 of which are multi-layer. Around the same time it received the first nine-layer line, Hamilton Plastics also added a five-layer and a three-layer line, both built in India.

“Our customers started asking, ‘What is your backup if the line goes down?’ I didn’t have a backup, so I bought another one.”

The two nine-layer lines boost Hamilton’s capacity by 5 million pounds a month. “Our relationship with Macchi has been great from the start. And we’ve gotten great service and great spare parts stocked in our faciity ready for whenever they’re needed,” Shah says. He adds that the Macchi lines have never stopped since they were installed, noting that line changeovers take as little as 10 minutes.

At this writing, Hamilton Plastics was running five orders of 2,000 pounds each for a new customer. “This customer gave us two different structures, and we consolidated all of them to metallocene-based materials at the same price,” Shah adds.

Sustainability is also a growing focus at Hamilton Plastics. It runs PFAS-free process aids at its plant, which helped it secure a $6-million order from an environmentally conscious customer, and offers products certified to be PFAS free. It also recently started using new additive technology that permits nylon and EVOH to be recycled in the PE stream. At Hamilton Plastics, scrap is recycled in-house and reused in can liners at a rate of 70%. The scrap is blended with metallocene polymers to make what the company says is the best-performing bag in the market.

The technology also blends nicely with the elder Shah’s history of developing innovative, problem-solving products. “There is a need in the market for film products containing nylon skin layers for forming and non-forming webs, so the lines we purchased have the flexibility to do that, down to 5-10% of total thickness. (Shah personally worked with Macchi engineers in Italy to make the required die design changes.) It can also have nylon or EVOH in the middle, or just EVOH in the middle, or in multiple layers. There is a huge opportunity in this market. We’re seeing all the metallized films being replaced by barrier sealant and PET reverse-printed lamination,” Shah notes.

While there is plenty of competition in the barrier films business, Shah believes Hamilton Plastics is differentiated in service, price and “not telling customers what they need to do.” Price comes into play partly because, in Shah’s view, some of his film processor competitors use more of the expensive barrier resin than the application requires.

“There is a need in the market for film products containing nylon skin layers, so the lines we purchased have the flexibility to do that, down to 5-10% of total thickness”

He adds, “We were also fortunate because, when the supply chain crisis hit, some of our competitors were offering lead times of 8-12 weeks. So, we got orders for applications that had been seven layers. We converted them to nine layers, at a lower price. And we delivered product within one week. Turning orders around in two weeks is uncommon in our industry. We started filling up the pipeline of customers that had been backed up because they couldn’t get product from their existing suppliers.”

There is also the management of personal touch. Even as CEO, Shad is typically involved in sales and product-development conference calls, noting that this approach appeals to customers who prefer to get answers right away. “There are a lot of much larger companies in the barrier film market, but some of them are so big that it might take them 3-4 days to get a quote out. Then, if they get the order, they have to wait to get samples”

Over time Hamilton began supplying a wide range of applications, including some not in food. A foam-padding application, for example, needed film with a nylon base to meet a need for high-temperature and high-puncture resistance.

Of course, people have been instrumental in helping Shah advance his company and embrace new technologies. Hamilton Plastics currently employs 130, many of whom have been with the film producer for 20 years or so. Says Shah, “My shipping manager was my first employee, and he is still here after 37 years. My plant manager started here at the age of 20, and he’s been here for 27 years. I’m fortunate that we have hired, trained and kept a great team.”

Hamilton Plastics follows GFSI global food safety initiative and is SQF 9.0 compliant, which is crucial for the food and medical packaging industry.
While the lines may be new, Shah notes he’s no novice to barrier-film production. “Most people don’t know at first how much experience I have in this technology. It dates back to 1982, years before Hamilton Plastics was started.”

Upgrades in the Lab Too

Hamilton Plastics has also recently fortified its analytics lab with state-of-the-art microscopes that provide detailed images of each film layer, along with their respective thicknesses. The lab is equipped to do all physical property testing, including DSC, FTIR, light transmission, and oxygen- and moisture-barrier transmission.

The film production business is also supported by the younger Shah’s entrepreneurial efforts. It was 10 years ago that Guru Shah started a trucking business and is now developing a logistics enterprise. Under Guru’s direction, both companies are growing and help Hamilton Plastics gain a competitive edge by enabling the film processor to quickly ship orders and track them efficiently.

“It’s been fun getting back into the barrier film business in such a big way,” Shah says. “If our salespeople stay on their toes and get in front of customers, I’m confident they will recognize the advantages we can provide.”