Following three years of capital investments, Baton Rouge-based Pod Pack International, a company that produces individually portioned packets of coffee and tea for use in hotels, offices and restaurants, has produced—and will ship today—its billionth unit.
“It took us 20 years to get half a billion pods shipped, and it only took us three years to do it again,” says Tom Martin, president and CEO, adding the memorable unit was produced for J.M. Smucker Company, which owns Folgers.
Martin estimates 95% of the company’s business comes from out of state.
In 2014, Pod Pack announced that it would invest more than $10 million through 2017. Since then, its staff has grown to more than 100. The company, which relocated to Baton Rouge from New Orleans nearly 20 years ago, also moved into a new facility on Manchac Park Lane, off Airline Highway, 18 months ago. The 74,000-square-foot facility is double the size of the company’s previous office on Industriplex Boulevard.
The company has a vision to keep expanding, Martin says, with plans to grow product lines as well as introduce within the next two to three years its own “environmentally friendly” single-serving brewing system for retail.
