Kruger Enters Nonwovens Market with Focus on Innovation

After 125 years of focusing on creating essential products to consumers’ everyday lives, family-owned Kruger Inc. is focusing on a new “essential” market—wipes. Last month, the company announced plans to invest $333 million in the establishment of Kruger Nonwovens, a new division dedicated to manufacturing nonwovens for a wide variety of plastic- and chemical-free wipes applications. Its first manufacturing site—the company’s 20^th—will be a Wetlace nonwovens line in  Île-de-la-Potherie in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, adjacent to Kruger’s Wayagamack paper mill,

“The mission of our company has been stated for a long time—to turn renewable resources into sustainable essentials for everyday life,” says Mansoor Parvaiz, senior vice president and COO, Kruger Nonwovens. “Wipes provide an opportunity to leverage our core capabilities. It is an attractive market with a good trajectory of growth where we can leverage our knowhow when it comes to fibers and wetlaid technologies.”

The investment is a part of Kruger’s portfolio diversification strategy, a long-term goal of the company, which started out in newsprint 125 years ago and, more recently, entered the consumer tissue market in the mid 1990s. The movement into the $25 billion wipes market, Parvais says, is already five years in the making. Before making an official announcement, the company did its homework, investing in resources and development and getting to know the business of wipes.

“We feel confident that, with the technology we are securing and what our internal knowledge we can compete in wipes,” he adds. “In many of the segments we have benchmarked performance with plastic and chemical free products, and we have found there are good opportunities in the market.”

Kruger Nonwovens’ initial investment is an Andritz Wetlace hybrid line, combining wetlaid and drylaid forming processes to develop ultra-high-performance, versatile nonwoven materials suitable for a broad portfolio of wipe applications. Manufactured without plastic fibers or chemical binders, these materials will be made from 100% natural ingredients including wood fibers sourced from responsibly managed forests and will be plastic-free, chemical-free, bioidegradable and compostable. The line is reportedly the first of its kind in Canada.

Before choosing the Andritz technology, Kruger tested multiple technologies, focusing primarily on product development, and this helped the company understand what it wanted to achieve with a wipes-related investment. “We felt this gave us the best solution to creating an eco-friendly product that is plastic and chemical free without sacrificing performance,” Parvais says. “Performance and quality was not something we wanted to compromise on.

Additionally, the similarities between wetlaid, Kruger’s core paper making technology, and Wetlace, made the team confident they could effectively run this line.  “I would say our of the seven sections of the manufacturing process, four or five are very similar,” Parvais says.

In terms of cost effectiveness, the ability to use efficient fiber blends was also attractive to Kruger, even though price is an area where the company is interested in competing. Instead, innovation and product quality will allow Kruger to compete successfully in a market that has been challenged with lower cost imports, particularly from manufacturers in China, where investment in wipes substrate technology has been strong in recent years.

“Performance and uniqueness will be the main angle we will continue to focus on to drive growth,” Parvais says. “At the same time, the market and customer base we have spoken to, there is a strong appetite for supply chain resilience.”