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Most
bread still came in a waxed paper wrapper when Alvin C. Formo
started building his machine to automatically push bread into
polyethylene bags.
The
year was 1964. Formo saw the growing possibilities in
poly-bagged bread, and against resistance from the baking
industry and warnings that poly-bagged bread was a passing fad,
he opened his business - Formost Packaging Machines, Inc., in
Seattle's old Ballard area. It was St. Patrick's Day.
Aware
of the growing market and sales potential for bagged bread,
Formo began his development of an automatic poly-bagging machine
in 1963. He had seen a prototype bagging machine that was
introduced in 1961 at the American Baking Association Convention
and Exposition in Atlantic City. The next year, he watched an
automatic bread bagging machine, developed by Roy Willard and
Bill Noyes, perform at Buchan Bakery in Seattle.
Formo
was impressed. He arranged with Willard and Noyes to acquire
their patent rights, then adapted several of the machine's
principles into the first Formost poly bagger. The prototype
bagging machine was sold in 1964 to Continental Baking Co. in
Spokane, Washington. The cost of the bagger without the conveyor
was approximately $9,275 in 1965.
In the early 1960's, while
traveling to Japan, Formo had an opportunity to observe the rapid
advancement of packaging machinery design and Fuji Machinery Co.'s
leading role in that development. It was very obvious that Fuji was
20 years ahead of the rest of the world in flexible packaging
machine design and was dedicated to maintain and increase that lead.
Over the years, this led to a
three-way licensing agreement with a Japanese trading company and
Fuji in Nagoya, Japan. The company is a major designer and
manufacturer of wrapping machines. Thus were born the Fuji-Formost
wrapping machines. |
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Since 1973, Formost Packaging,
Inc.'s main office and plant has been located in a 50,000 square
foot facility in Woodinville, Washington.
The type of products bagged or
wrapped on the company's high-speed machines now range from bakery items
to individually wrapped plastic cups, candy bars, hash brown potatoes,
chewing gum, note pads, shoe insoles, games, and many, many more
nationally distributed products.
The Formost GTS Bagger is today the
most versatile machine in the bagging
industry. It is designed to bag bakery goods, produce items, textile
products, candy, toys, and sundries... at speeds up to 100 units per
minute.
For wrapping
a wide variety of products, Formost promotes its Fuji-Formost
horizontal form-fill-seal machines. These are designed with
microprocessor controls, servo motor drive systems, quick film
changeover features and other innovative systems.
In addition, Formost has designed
and built infeed
systems for many products, along with special product
handling systems. Formost's employees, machines, and
operations have helped position Formost as a leading designer and
innovator in the world-wide packaging machine market.
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