Closure Safety Archives - Hoffer Plastics

From Rigid Bottles to Spouted Pouches: Innovation that Transforms Packaging and Performance

Hoffer Team — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 18:12:48 +0000

When Prestone, a trusted leader in automotive fluids, set out to refresh its packaging to a flexible spouted pouch for its top-off pouch, the goal was clear: reduce environmental impact, improve cost efficiency and ensure product safety. The company saw an opportunity to evolve the packaging from a rigid bottle to a large-format spouted pouch – a lighter and more sustainable packaging solution that uses significantly less plastic.

To make this vision a reality, Prestone needed more than a supplier. It needed partners with the expertise to deliver a high-performing closure system capable of safely containing automotive chemicals, ensuring child resistance and maintaining seal integrity. Equally important, the new design needed to meet customer demand for a more sustainable packaging option, one that strengthens the brand, reduces transportation impact and enhances the overall user experience.

Pouch converter and flexible packaging manufacturer Zacros America partnered with closure expert Hoffer Plastics to rise to the challenge. Together, they combined Zacros’ flexible pouch design expertise with Hoffer’s precision-engineered Trust-T-Lok P22 spout to create a safe, efficient and sustainable packaging solution that brought Prestone’s vision to life.

Learn how Hoffer’s Trust-T-Lok P22 Spout with six-pitch design made all the difference for Prestone’s debut of large-format flexible spouted pouches.

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Hoffer Plastics Debuts Expanded Lok Line at PACK EXPO Booth N-5138

Hoffer Team — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 17:44:58 +0000

Flexible and rigid solutions deliver more choices, more value and more impact.

SOUTH ELGIN, Ill. (September 23, 2025) – Hoffer Plastics announced today the expanded Lok family of closures, debuting at PACK EXPO Las Vegas (Sept. 29–Oct. 1), Booth N-5138. Building on a legacy of customer-driven engineering, the new line extensions give brands greater versatility, speed and value across flexible and rigid formats – while enhancing performance, reliability and shelf appeal.

Product highlights

Hoffer’s Trust-T-Lok Drop-In Cap & Spouts runs on existing pouch filling equipment without modifications and cuts plastic by 18.5%. Patented tamper-evident technologies boost product integrity and consumer trust. Caps are available with FDA-compliant PCR content upon request and are fully compatible with existing machines, including mono-PE and mono-PP structures, making this closure recycle-ready.
The new Trust-T-Lok P22 Spouts ease the shift from bulky rigid bottles to slim, efficient pouches, cutting material costs, energy use and CO₂ emissions. Up to 26 truckloads can be consolidated into one. Larger printable surface area enables bolder branding on store shelves. The spout is offered in tamper-evident, child-resistant and spray-hose versions on one versatile spout base for universal use on pouch making equipment.
38 mm & 28 mm Rigid Caps offer expanded options with uncompromising tamper evidence, faster lead times and compatibility with glass, PET and HDPE. These caps are ideal for fresh juices, dairy, kombucha and energy drinks. The 38 mm format comes in three distinct options-Hoffer Drop Lok, Standard Double Lead and DBJ neck finishes tailored to the niche premium beverage sizes most commonly seen at Whole Foods and Fresh Market.

“Every addition to the Lok line was designed with our customers’ biggest challenges in mind – reducing costs, improving performance and sustainability and making their brands more visible on shelf,” said John Strubulis, Senior Product Manager at Hoffer Plastics. “Our commitment at Hoffer extends far beyond supplying closures. Our commitment is to engineer solutions with real business impact.”

Meet us at PACK EXPO: To schedule an in-booth interview with John Strubulis, contact Jody Delie at jdelie@trefoilgroup.com.

Learn more: Visit our landing page for product specs and resources: https://hofferplastics.com/sem/lok-family-packaging-enhancements/

About Hoffer Plastics

Robert “Bob” and Helen Hoffer founded Hoffer Plastics in 1953. Over 70 years later, the company continues its commitment to driving success for its customers, employees and the industry. A full-service contract manufacturing partner, Hoffer produces more than three billion plastic parts annually with a consistent 99.45% on-time delivery record. The company serves customers in markets that include flexible packaging, medical, automotive, consumer, industrial, health & beauty and appliances. Located in South Elgin, Illinois, Hoffer employs more than 350 individuals within its 365,000-square-foot facility located on 24 acres. The company has pioneered numerous product innovations, including its Lok family of products. For more information, visit www.hofferplastics.com.

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Custom Closures: Faster to Market Through Collaborative Engineering

Hoffer Team — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 15:33:32 +0000

When RoseBud Ice Cream set out to disrupt the frozen treat category, it brought more than just a new product to market. It introduced a bold new format: premium ice cream in a flexible, pouch-based package.

To make the vision a reality, Founder Sam Rose needed more than a supplier. He needed a partner who could deliver a high-performance closure system that balanced function and food safety while pairing seamlessly with his custom equipment.

Hoffer Plastics rose to the challenge, applying deep technical expertise and a collaborative approach to help bring RoseBud’s innovative concept to life on time and with confidence.

Learn how the right closure partner made all the difference for RoseBud’s market debut!

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Spouts and Caps: Unwrapping the Magic of Flexible Packaging

Hoffer Team — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 16:04:21 +0000

Tomte Cake, a company delivering a fresh take on a beloved holiday classic – gingerbread houses, captured the attention of audiences on Shark Tank.

As they began to prepare commercializing their product, they identified the need for a proven, reliable partner to provide secure, child-friendly caps and spouts for its flexible frosting pouches. Hoffer Plastics’ Trust-T-Lok cap and spout, a proprietary closure system, provided the perfect balance of security and ease-of-use.

Hoffer Plastic’s delivered 25,500 color-matched caps and spouts in eight weeks from initial conversation to shipped product, ready to meet holiday demand!

Click below to learn more about the collaboration between Tomte Cake and Hoffer Plastics.

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Seal It Right: Selecting the Best Cap and Spout for Your Flexible Packaging Application

Hoffer Team — Thu, 30 May 2024 14:39:54 +0000

A convenient, lighter-weight solution that uses less material and extends shelf life, flexible packaging is flexing its strengths in the marketplace today. This type of packaging, which you mostly recognize in formats like pouches, bags and more, is widely utilized across a variety of industries from food and beverage to personal and home care solutions and beyond.

Beyond the quality of your flexible film, caps and spouts are a critical factor in a product’s success. Finding the right solution for your application can maximize the safety, sustainability and production efficiency of the whole package to protect your brand and product’s reputation in the market and differentiate on-shelf.

Here’s a look at three considerations to make sure you select a cap and spout that’s just right for you and today’s consumers.

Driving Production Efficiency

Caps and spouts must be chosen intentionally to properly integrate with your complete package. To optimize manufacturing and minimize overall expenses, it’s crucial to consider how caps and spouts assimilate into your filling processes. For example, consider the different fill types that may be required for your product – fill-through or assembled – or even the filling processes, like retort, hot fill, HPP (high pressure pasteurization) or ambient.

But the most important specification to examine for caps and spouts? Compatibility with filling machines.

Existing filling equipment can sometimes limit your choices for caps and spouts, as fitments must be specified to fit specific filling machines. However, if your co-manufacturing partner or internal team is just establishing a new filling line, or integrating new equipment, you now have the opportunity to select a machine that aligns with your preferred cap and spout provider.

How Hoffer Plastics Can Help

With a comprehensive and continuously evolving line of flexible packaging caps and spouts, known as Trust-T-Lok, we’re always ready to deliver the right solution for your needs, including:

Minimizing your upfront investment – Collaborating with filling machine manufacturers – including Mespack, Effytec, IMA and more – to make sure your caps are compatible with industry-leading filling equipment. We also offer a drop-in option that can work with almost any machine on the market.
Supporting your filling process – Offering proven solutions for nearly any new system – form-fill-seal, fill-seal; hot fill, ambient, retort, fill through, assembled, etc.
Accelerating launch success – Customizing our proprietary Trust-T-Lok caps to meet your specific needs with a variety of designs, colors and sizes to quickly fulfill upon your needs.

Supporting Sustainability

For some applications, flexible packaging can achieve critical goals that make it a more attractive alternative to rigid options. For example, where product weight and transportation are a concern, flexible packaging is a lightweight and efficient solution. Your caps and spouts should similarly advance your sustainability – and business – goals.

The right fitments may be able to do their job with less plastic or incorporate recyclable or biodegradable alternatives to lessen your carbon footprint. Caps and spouts can also be made from post-production resins that help reduce plastic waste in landfills.

As a result, you can further reduce your environmental footprint and align with eco-conscious consumer preferences.

How Hoffer Plastics Can Help

We’ve worked hard to upgrade our spout and cap designs and production to:

Eliminate unnecessary material, specifically in the evolution of our P-15 cap, which was redesigned to require 46% less plastic than its previous iteration.
Incorporate mono-material solutions where feasible to make it easier to recycle – including our proprietary Lok family of patented closures for the growing grab-and-go market.
Leverage unique resin blends that can lower heat seal initiation if needed with certain Mono PE solutions.
Reduce our own carbon footprint with significant material, energy and water usage reductions throughout our entire manufacturing facility.

Maximizing Product Safety

From the store shelf to the home, flexible packaging helps protect foods, beverages, personal care products and pharmaceuticals. Caps and spouts play a key role in this mission. Your closures must provide a perfect seal, safeguard quality, and prevent choking and other safety hazards.

These are potentially life-and-death issues. To protect consumers and build trust and loyalty, you don’t just need standard features like tamper-evident seals. You also need a cap and spout manufacturer you can trust to uphold the most stringent product safety and quality standards during their own manufacturing process to protect your reputation and most importantly, end users.

How Hoffer Plastics Can Help

You’ll find an unwavering commitment to the highest standards of food safety and quality in all of our Trust-T-Lok products and every step of our production process.

SQF Certified – We are certified by SQF, an independent verification that our products and processes meet stringent international standards for food safety. In addition to other certifications including IMS, IATF and MedAccred.
CPSC choke-proof standards – Crucial for food applications to make sure children are safe around your caps.
Tamper-evident closures – Providing a hermetic seal for security and consumer confidence through our Trust-T-Lok line.

Delivering a Satisfying Sense of Closure

When you incorporate the right spout or cap for your flexible packaging, you help maximize the advantages of sustainability, efficiency, safety and, ultimately, consumer satisfaction.

We hope these tips help you achieve that for your product. If you have any questions about the keys to success with closures, don’t hesitate to contact us! Looking for rigid packaging solutions? Learn more about our proprietary Drop-Lok closures here.

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Hoffer Plastics Meets Growing Demand with a Focus on Sustainability

Hoffer Team — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 14:30:14 +0000

Custom molder to showcase full range of injection molded caps, closures and fitments for flexible and rigid solutions at Pack Expo booth N11308

Sustainability is in Hoffer Plastics’ DNA. So is meeting customer needs for safety, product functionality and aesthetics. Through its Lok family of closures, which will be on display at booth N11308 at Pack Expo 2023, Hoffer Plastics delivers environmentally friendly solutions that preserve product integrity while building customers’ brands. These innovative solutions are engineered to advance sustainable practices with mono-material solutions that are recycle-ready and reduce plastic material usage for lighter-weight solutions. These high-quality, cost-effective options meet CPSC choke-proof specifications making them ideal for food applications, where safety is paramount.

Hoffer Plastics also offers a broad range of solutions that meet customer packaging requirements beyond standard caps and spouts. Perfected over 70 years, the company offers expertise in engineering, design for manufacturability (DFM), tooling, injection molding and assembly. Its MedAccred-certified operations serve customers with unique packaging needs across Beauty, Food & Beverage, Automotive, Personal Care and Medical markets. Visitors to booth N1130 can learn more about the company’s custom injection molding solutions and learn how the team drives critical initiatives like lightweighting to support sustainability goals.

“Our full range of custom injection molded solutions coupled with our proprietary flexible packaging solutions enable us to put our customers at the center of our business model to deliver more value,” said Alex Hoffer, Hoffer Plastics Co-CEO. “Our ability to achieve critical sustainability goals while protecting product aesthetics and functionality ensures our customers across markets can accelerate their business growth.”

Honored as the Plastics News Sustained Excellence Award winner earlier this year, Hoffer Plastics’ patented closures were a key contributor to this recognition. In addition to greater recyclability and choke-proof features, its Trust-T-Lok and Drop-Lok product lines offer seal integrity and tamper-evident features for end user safety. These closures are also compatible with producers’ existing equipment to minimize upfront investments in machinery and shorten launch timeframes. Hoffer Plastics has previously collaborated with film converters and fill machine manufacturers to provide sustainability packaging to the market.

The sustainability focus within its Lok products and custom injection molded solutions represents the company’s position as an environmental steward since its inception. Hoffer Plastics continues to prioritize internal recycling initiatives, champion water usage reductions, leverage on-site co-generation capabilities to relieve the power grid in critical situations and more. This inherent commitment to sustainability is a key driver behind the company’s ability to continuously innovate new solutions that protect not only its customers but the environment and the community.

Contact Kirsten Hewitt (khewitt@trefoilgroup.com) to schedule an in-booth interview with Hoffer Plastics’ Vice President of Sales, Millie Nuno.

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Hoffer Plastics and Mespack Partner for Breakthrough Innovation

Hoffer Team — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:34:22 +0000

Featured at this year’s Global Pouch Forum: Partners Hoffer Plastics, a family owned custom injection molder based in South Elgin, IL, and Mespack, a global producer of flexible packaging machinery based in Barcelona Spain. A shared vision and passion for innovation in packaging, and a perfect match of complementary skills and technical expertise.

Hoffer and Mespack’s Shared Goal: Impact the entire flexible packaging supply chain through innovations that:

Encourage growth
Minimize production downtime
Enable production independence
Promote environmental sustainability

Hoffer and Mespack achieved this by melding and leveraging the technical spouted pouch “know-how” of Hoffer with the global machinery excellence of Mespack. It’s about respect, trust, and shared goals.

An open, holistic approach to product development

Hoffer and Mespack consider all aspects of the value chain: the needs, problems and benefits to end consumers, the brand, co-packers, converters, cap and spout suppliers, and machine suppliers.
They embrace contributions and capabilities from other internal and external sources that can add value.

Announcing the HF Series: A Revolutionary Fill-Though-the Spout Machine

A direct result of the Hoffer/Mespack collaboration. The machine is capable of running fully recyclable spouted pouches like the CellPouch.

Additional partners that contributed to make this a successful launch included Widmann and BBC Cellpack Packaging.

This machine can:

Run multiple products at once at enhanced speeds
Be augmented with various end of line modules
Deliver enhanced product safety and reliability through its consistent cap application.

Features of The CellPouch package:

Delivers outstanding seal integrity through the use of ultrasonic technology
Provides shelf life of up to 12 months
Can be run with a variety of hot or cold fill applications.
Certified as being fully recyclable in the European Union, with potential expansion to North America and beyond

To see this exciting innovation in action, click here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1vlRNg5djc&trk=organization-update-content_share-embed-video_share-article_title&ab_channel=MESPACK-InnovativePackagingSolutions

For more information, contact Justin Markel at Hoffer Plastics: j-markel@hofferpl.com.

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