This week’ s program was a tour of River Valley Converting in the Whitetail Ridge Corporate Park, 2552 Prairie Drive. RVC CEO Brooke Lee provided an overview of the company, and then Todd Nerbonne gave a tour. CEO Brook Lee has been the CEO of Anchor Paper since 2014. River Valley Converting is a merger of two facilities in Hudson, one acquired in 2013 and a second that has been part of Anchor since 1982. The River Falls building is huge, 87,500 sq. ft. RVC has 50 employees who work four 12-hour shifts per week. Their employees are cross-trained so that each can run several of the specialized machines which cut large rolls of paper, bubble wrap, or foam sheets into customized sizes for other companies.
RVC's specialized machines have allowed them to bounce back quickly from the supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic. They can switch to new requirements quickly, remain profitable even with short runs and can produce products with very tight tolerances. They have a lot of storage for inventory and so can respond quickly to new requests.
The company moved to River Falls from Hudson because they wanted to remain close to their original location in Hudson so they would not lose employees, River Falls was helpful and friendly, and they wanted to be the “first stop” when entering Wisconsin for the ease of shipping.
One very interesting RVC product is specialized seed germination paper. When a seed package says the seeds will germinate in 15 days, the seed company knows that because of the seed germination paper used in test labs that RVC produces. They can even cut circles for petri dishes. All scraps from the cutting are recycled in St. Paul. The amount of recycled paper is significant. With the recycling that RVC and others does as part of their business, the paper industry plants more trees than they cut down.