An Anonymous Park In West Boylston | Businesses include paper products distributor
I’ve visited industrial parks all over Central Massachusetts and some of them are much more visible and well-marked than others.
Some, like Centech Park in Shrewsbury or Pioneer Business Park in Oxford, have giant signs. You can’t miss them. Others may be completely unmarked except for telltale “Industrial Park Road” street signs.
I was recently in West Boylston, and along Route 140, noticed signs for an “Industrial Area.” Each intersection along the way was well-marked with such a sign and the signs led to a quiet stretch of Shrewsbury Street in West Boylston not far from the Worcester border or from Interstates 290 or 190.
The businesses on either side of the street, while few in number, represent a good mix of distribution centers, manufacturers and service providers.
It’s In The Bag
Bunzl New England, a distributor of paper products located at 180 Shrewsbury St., deals with very, very simple products. All the paper and plastic bags you use in the grocery store, from the salad containers to the deli bags to the meat trays and the plastic film that wraps that tray, are delivered to those stores by Bunzl, an English company with about 100 employees between its West Boylston and Portland, Maine facilities.
All the shopping bags and boxes you get at Macy’s or JC Penney were also delivered by Bunzl.
Tom Dobat, Bunzl’s general manager in West Boylston, explained that as the industry has changed, so has Bunzl. The company doesn’t just distribute paper and plastic packaging materials anymore. In fact, it runs a “cross-dock” system that requires the company to act as a full-fledged logistics firm.
Here’s my attempt at the simple version: The system allows Bunzl to pick up a supermarket chain’s product order, put the order on pallets, shrink wrap those pallets and put the pallets on the supermarket’s trucks while reporting to the supermarket exactly what is on each and every pallet and what each pallet’s final destination is and when it’s supposed to be there.
As companies like supermarket chains and large retailers grew, they had to ask themselves how much capital they wanted to “tie up in inventory,” Dobat said. “And they realized we could do it cheaper.”
West Boylston’s industrial area also includes Central Coating Co. Inc., “The largest applicator of coatings in the Northeast.”
The company has been in business for more than 30 years and it shows. It handles jobs that sound as simple as cosmetic painting and silk screening to jobs that require “form-in-place gasketing” and “conformal coating.”
That means Central coats such a wide range of products for such a wide range of industries that we hardly go a day without coming into contact with their work. The little Motorola logo you’re so used to seeing and many of the logos on the medical equipment and machinery at hospitals are often applied by Central pad printing equipment.
From there, it only gets more complex for Central and for the other businesses in the park. And this is where it gets most interesting.
Other manufacturers in West Boylston’s “Industrial Area” include Pardi Manufacturing Inc., a tiny, three-person company that makes brass and aluminum fittings for boilers and hot water tanks, and H.O. Wire Co. Inc.
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