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Updated: April 7, 2025 / 2025 Manufacturing Excellence Awards

Manufacturing awards: Rocheleau Tool & Die thrives by helping others

Eight people stand together in front of manufacturing machinery on a cement floor. Photo I Courtesy of Rocheleau Tool & Die The Rocheleau executive team, which includes members of the third-generation ownership (Lisa Rocheleau, Steven Rocheleau, and Dan Rocheleau), and fourth-generation team (Nick Rocheleau, Alex Rocheleau, Zack Rocheleau, Allison Rocheleau Baker, and Kayla Rocheleau)
By Livia Gershon
2025 Manufacturing Excellence Awards
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Certain lucky students at Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School get a chance for a career jumpstart: an 18-month co-op at Rocheleau Tool & Die Co, located just down the road in Fitchburg, learning computer-aided design (CAD), machining, and other skills that are much-needed and in short supply in the workforce.

“We have hired every single one that has come through our program,” said Allison Rocheleau Baker, Rocheleau’s marketing and communication manager. “It’s always been a very mutually beneficial partnership with them.”

Rocheleau Baker, a fourth-generation member of the family-owned business founded by her great-grandfather in 1938, said collaborative relationships of all sorts have been a key to the company’s success for decades. That’s true on the international scale, since the company makes blow molding and automation machines for plastics and packaging companies around the world. It’s true locally as well, since Rocheleau manufactures containers for more than 100 New England dairies and orchards.

Being connected to trade groups, high schools and colleges, and other institutions helps Rocheleau benefit its industry and customers while raising its own profile.

The company donates or sells machines to colleges across the U.S. and Canada for use in educational programs. That not only helps students gain expertise in the latest real-world processes but gives the company an edge with the next generation of workers, who will make procurement choices at the companies they join. Its executives frequently collaborate with administrators and speak to students at high schools and colleges about jobs in manufacturing.

A bio box for Rocheleau Tool & Die
A bio box for Rocheleau Tool & Die

“A lot of people don’t think about how products get to the shelves,” Rocheleau Baker said. “They don’t necessarily think of those jobs as an option.”

Among other efforts, company leaders are working this year with UMass Lowell, helping a small group of students with a simulation of a real-world problem, designing packaging for a particular product incorporating post-consumer recycled material.

The company is deeply involved in organizations including the Society of Plastics Engineers, the PLASTICS Association, the North Central Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce, and the Associated Industries of Massachusetts. These connections let it stay on top of new developments and give it a voice in policy making.

Rocheleau Baker said these organizations help the company figure out how to proceed in the face of an uncertain climate, particularly current questions about the President Donald Trump Administration’s tariff policies impacting its business as an international importer. Business and industry groups set up chances for the company’s leaders to meet with state and local legislators about this and other issues. In the past, those conversations often included issues around the plastics industry and improving recycling to create a more circular economy.

“We have found that we do better as a business the more that we are involved,” Rocheleau Baker said.

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