Houston company gets a snack packing machine and sales soar.
Editor’s note: This story originally appeared Sunday, Oct. 3, 1965.
A new method of packaging snack foods has enabled a Houston firm to grow in seven years to one of the nations’s leading manufacturers of automatic packaging machinery.
When W.C. Leasure started Mira-Pak, Inc. in 1958 he had a building of less than 1,000 square feet. Today the firm’s plant at 7000 Ardmore has 100,000 square feet.
In its first year, Mira-Pak earned 2 cents a share. Last year it was 33 cents a share and projections for this fiscal year are for a 40 percent increase in profits.
It pumps close to $2 million a year into other Houston businesses to supply component parts of its packaging machines.
It sells its packaging machinery not only throughout this country but in many foreign countries. It has a cross licensing agreement with a West German firm through which its machinery is made there and by which it makes the specialized German packaging machinery here.
Other divisions
Leasure said the company is now expanding into contract packaging for other firms in a separate plant here and plans its next major move into a complete systems approach for packaging problems.
Mira-Pak last month acquired another Houston firm, Dynomax, Inc., which makes a piece of food processing equipment which will complement the new systems approach to packaging. The cash transaction, when completed at the end of a two-year option period, will be around $150,000.
To finance its expansion, Mira-Pak in August raised $800,000 with the private placement of an issue of 5½ percent convertible subordinated debentures, and arranged for a $600,000 loan from a local bank.
The whole original basis of the company was the need by the snack food industry for a machine which could automatically package its products.
Leasure says there were “make and fill” machines which would make packages and fill them but they wouldn’t handle irregular size products.
The packaging process involved using a pre-made bag and each bag had to be handled.
Take potato chips for example. The Mira-Pak machines take them form a bulk source, weigh out a bag size portion, make a package, fill it, seal it and deliver the finished bag you buy at the store — all at a high rate of speed.
It used to take three people for the process.
The machines make packages out of almost any flexible packaging material — foil, vinyl, celophane, paper, plastics or any combination of the materials. They make the package in any size or shape.
In addition to snack foods, it will package in the same manner such things as the little plastic bags of nuts, bolts and screws which come with the toy you bought your children for Christmas and had to assemble yourself. Frozen vegetables, bulk chemicals, cookies — all lend themselves to the same automatic packaging and Mira-Pak is expanding into these other applications from its snackfood beginning.
The roster of the firm’s customers contains many of the biggest names in the food business: Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. (A&P stores), Frito-Lay, Borden Foods and Pet Milk Co.
Leasure said Mira-Pak probably is the nation’s largest manufacturer of automatic packaging machinery for the snack foods industry.
25 suppliers
The Ardmore plant assembles the packaging machines from components contracted out to 25 Houston suppliers who include Ambox, Inc., B&W Machine Co., G & H Tool Co., B. W. January Machine Co. and Wade Machine Works.
The new contract packaging division is a logical outgrowth of Mira-Pak’s business. It has previously supplied machinery with which others may do their packaging. Now it will do their packaging for them.
Leasure said the leased plant on Du Pont and Eastwood can act as a “surplus production facility” manufacturers can have available as a standby. He said they expect to handle production of packages for market testing where there will be a limited amount of the new package produced, not justifying a company tooling up for a mass, long-term output.
Pharmaceutical packaging is expected to be a principal source of revenue for the contract division.
Rigid packages
Where Mira-Pak’s machines mostly make flexible packages, their agreement with the German firm gives them access to a similar machine which makes rigid and semi-rigid packages.
Leasure came to Houston in 1948 from his native Pennsylvania. He was with the Syntron Co., a manufacturer of automatic material handling equipment.
In 1955 he went into business for himself, building up and then selling a tool rental business and a machine supply business “to get the capital to start” Mira-Pak.
There were 10 employees when Mira-Pak started. Today there are more than 200. The gross sales that first year were $256,000. Last year they were $4.3 million and the profits, $291,550, exceeded the entire sales
figure for 1958.
Over the counter stock
Mira-Pak went public in December of last year. There are 889,675 shares of stock outstanding, traded over the counter and selling for around $9 a share currently. The company’s officers make up a bulk of its directors, including vicepresidents James C. Wylie, John L. Kelley, Stuart Keene, Stewart Blodgett and A. N. Wiley. Other directors include Houston investor Robert B. Baldwin, Houston attorney Dempsey J. Prappas, Birmingham potato chip manufacturer Cloan Y. Bashinsky and Leasure.