What’s Really Driving Corrugated Demand | Ryan Fox

In this episode, Cory Connors welcomes back longtime friend of the show Ryan Fox from Bloomberg Intelligence for his fourth or fifth appearance. Ryan shares how he stumbled into the corrugated industry by accident in 2010 after a career detour through ministry and fitness equipment sales, and how he eventually landed at Bloomberg Intelligence in 2020 to cover the industry full time. The conversation dives deep into Ryan's one-of-a-kind Box Makers' Certificate (BMC) collection, the surprising history behind why BMCs exist at all, and what's really driving corrugated demand (or the lack of it) in 2025. 

Key Topics Discussed: 

• Ryan's winding path into corrugated: ministry, fitness equipment sales, an MBA in innovation management, and a chance connection into a box plant sales job
• How Ryan became a full-time industry analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence starting April 1, 2020
• Ryan's collection of over 500 Box Makers' Certificates (BMCs), how he organizes and classifies them, and his "This Old Box" LinkedIn series
• The 100+ year history of the BMC: corrugated's origins in the late 1890s, Robert Gare's accidental invention, and Sam Langston's early corrugating machine
• The 1914 Pridham decision, railroad price gouging, and how Rule 41 created the need for box certification
• The 1960s shift with NMFC Item 222 and how the 42-lb kraft linerboard / 26-lb semi-chemical medium index shaped "should-cost" pricing for 200-lb Mullen board
• The industry's move from Mullen to ECT (Edge Crush Test) starting in 1990, and why 32 ECT (C-flute) dominates as the commodity grade for single-wall boxes
• The science of box strength: the McKee formulation, predicting ECT from paper properties, and tools like the Chalmers Dynamic Stiffness Tester
• Behind-the-scenes craftsmanship: corrugator operations, die-mounting, flexographic print plates, and why a cutting die can cost $5,000
• The value of skilled trades on the plant floor and the case for box buyers to tour a corrugated plant
• 2025 industry trends: square footage of boxes produced matching 1994 levels, the impact of offshoring pre-packaged imports, and 400,000+ open U.S. manufacturing jobs
• Wages and opportunity in box plants, from $22/hour entry-level to $35/hour for skilled press operators
• Why corrugated demand spiked during the pandemic and has since receded: shifting consumer spending, GLP-1 drugs, e-commerce paper mailers, and macro headwinds like conflict in Iran and rising freight and gas prices
• Outlook for corrugated volume heading into the next 12-18 months

Resources Mentioned:

• Bloomberg Intelligence
• Fibre Box Association data
• LinkedIn: Ryan Fox
• LinkedIn: Bloomberg

Contact:
 
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Transcript

0:06

Welcome to Sustainable Packaging with Cory Connors presented by Atlantic Packaging. I'm your host, Cory Connors. In today's episode, I connected with longtime friend of the show, Ryan Fox from Bloomberg Intelligence. We talked about the corrugated market and even discuss his unique collection of corrugated BMCs. I'd also like to thank our sponsors, 3M and Specright. We couldn't do the show without them. Welcome back, Mr. Ryan Fox. think this will be your fourth or fifth time on our podcast. I'm so excited to have you on, Thanks for having me Cory, it's always great to see you and it's always great to be with you here. Well, let's get right into it. Tell us for those of our audience who don't know you, tell us a little bit about your background and what got you into Corrugated. Yeah. So I got into corrugated by sheer accident back in 2010. I originally started my career, much like Adam peak. I started my career, in the ministry thing, and that didn't really turn out too well for me. It just didn't stick. didn't, it wasn't for me. Then I went into the sales and got into fitness equipment sales and, the great financial crisis hit and the company went bankrupt. I was at, in that time I was used, uh, was at NC state to get out. MBA in innovation management. And I graduated in 2010, but with no job. And I had a friend of a friend of a friend who knew somebody, you know, and they needed a salesperson in a corrugated box plant. I had no idea that this job even existed. And I went and I went and, I interviewed it. It seemed to go pretty well. They hired me on the spot. started the next day and, you know, hit the ground running. Had a pretty good, uh, success record, uh, for the first few years I got recruited to go work, uh, for one of the bigger integrated. So did that for a few years and then. Uh, had a required opportunity to find new employment and then went into distribution. Yeah. And then in the pandemic, um, I was approached by a head Hunter at Bloomberg that said, Hey, you've got an MBA. You've got experience in the industry. Would you. think about doing industry reporting. And I said, that sounds incredible. Let's talk about it. So here we go. It was April 1st of 2020 when I started doing this and it was part-time to begin. And then by 2021, we moved into full time. Well, and it's obvious how passionate you are and you've even started collecting things in regards to core to corrugated. Let's talk about you've got the probably the world's largest uh box makers certificate collection. For those of us in the industry, that's BMC. uh Tell us about that. How did that start? How did it start? Well, it started because I didn't always know about all of the box plants in the country. I just didn't know there were so many. And I got some industry data back in 2020 and I thought there's over 1,100 box plants in the country. And I thought, well, I should try to keep track of these folks. And part of it was I wanted to know who I could call. and who I could connect with and see if I could expand my reach. so that's kind of what motivated it was just to see who was making boxes, who were shipping boxes in my region and what I was able to get. And I mean, if you haven't got some new ones here, is Rand Whitney from their Boylston Mass. I did not have that one. And then this is another one here. This was one. I think this is a distributor. They're called city paper and they're in Birmingham, Alabama. So I collect them, um, whether they're a distributor or manufacturer, I just kind of collect them and see who's out there. I put them into a spreadsheet so I can log them and I classify them by sheet plant or a core getter plan or distributor, something like that. And yeah, that's how I do it. And then I just toss them in a box for right now. I put all the BMCs in a box and Maybe one day my wife will let me, uh, you know, make a map of the, U S with BMCs. Yeah. Right. Yeah. seen like people do like license plates. So yeah, that'd be really neat. well I do have the hashtag box nerd license plate so I also do collect I also collect books about the corrugated industry whether or not they're textbooks or or books that people have written about different facets of the the industry I'm like where's my I don't see I don't see it close by but I recently got one that was packaging engineering. Well, by Mountainfort, he was the guy that did the whole McKee formulation. Oh, interesting. So how many BMCs have you collected? hundreds, probably somewhere in the 500 range. And I gotta tell you that some of them, well, so some of them are old and so they're not current, but the old ones are fun because then I get to do this old box post. And so for those who don't know on LinkedIn, will occasionally go antiquing with my wife, we'll find an old box. I do a little bit of research on the company who was making the product. well as the company who made the box and provide a little bit of background on it. Hopefully it will be feeder material for a book called This Old Box. I love that idea. I think you should be an app or make a book for sure. That's a great idea. I would certainly be a customer. uh and my mom, we've at least got two. I think I can find a few friends to buy some. Well, let's talk about the BMC. What is it for? What does it do? And why is it needed on a corrugated box? Because I've had people ask me, do I actually need to put a BMC on a box? Well, I think nowadays you probably don't. But this actually has roots that go back over 100 years. Yeah. Most people don't know that corrugated packaging is only about 130 years old, and it started in the late 1890s. It was kind of an accident. Originally, in the mid-1800s, people were pressing paper and putting the corrugation in it to do the the supports in your hat to keep your top hat up. And then somebody said, well, you know, if we glue a flat sheet of corrugated to the outside of it, we could wrap around bottles and lanterns and things like that. It'd be protective. And then somebody said, well, I wonder if we glued another layer on the other side, what could we do with it? And then the story goes that Robert Gare had this accident in New York City and they made a box and away we went. So that was really around the turn of the you know, the, the 1900s where it started to get some steam. We had, there was a picture online recently, Weber packaging in Philadelphia was one of the first, companies in the U S who worked with Sam Langston. That's a, an industry name there to have the first corrugated, one of the first corrigators. And it was the first machine to kind of do that whole process in one swipe where you put in paper on one side and and it popped a corrugated sheet on the other end. So that was in the early 1900s. In 1914, the courts, there was a, again, a lot of people don't know this, there was a decision called the Pridham decision. And ultimately what was happening during those early days, when you think about shipping, if you were gonna put your product in something, what was it going to travel in? And it wasn't a corrugated box. was probably a crate or a barrel. Hey friends, we are going to take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Please be sure to support them. Are you shipping with recycled corrugated? Think outside the box with 3M tape. 3M packaging tape can help you overcome your recycled corrugated challenges with confidence, making sure your boxes are sealed securely the first time, reducing downtime, and providing consistent performance. 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A platform that connects packaging knowledge with AI intelligence, giving you access to verified suppliers, real capabilities, and actionable data in one place. Take action at speed. Execute with intelligence. That's Forest. We have nomenclature today, know, you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel there now, aren't you? Well, that's where all the crumbs were. That's where all the mouse droppings were, whatever. It's the stuff you didn't want. Well, it was expensive and it was heavy. And so when the corrugated boxes came around, some of these companies had an option and they wanted to do that. They wanted to exercise that option to ship it with a corrugated box rather than a crate. Well, the railroads didn't like that. They wanted to sell you the crates to use because they ensure the passage of materials. And ultimately what they were doing was they were price gouging. They said, well, we'll ship your box, but we're going to charge you an arm and a leg to do it. And so people sued the rails and the courts ruled in their favor in 1914. And that was really where we saw a lot of pickup and activity in the corrugated box industry. And so one of the things that came out of that was called rule 41. And it was a way for the rails to... have some certainty about what the box was. Right. And so the producers had to stamp the box with what it was made of. And there were some rules that they came up with about the size and how much weight it could bear and all that. So this is where our early forms of packaging come out. Like we talk about 200 pound Mullen or a Mullen grade board versus now we use ECTs. ECTs were not even a thing back in the early 1900s. It was all Mullen. and so really that's that was kind of the the big springboard for having a box makers certificate was it was a to to fall in line with rule 41 around the 1960s the national motor freight carriers enacted item 222 which is a similar ruling that that you had to have some kind of a specification on the box because they didn't want things to collapse during shipment and And so that was really where in the 1960s things, you know, if you weren't putting a BMC in there, they really picked up that. That's awesome. I didn't know that about the trains. That's really cool history. I think it's important that we know that stuff. Yeah. other thing that's kind of interesting is that this is where the 42 pound craft liner board index comes from. Most people don't even know this is so 42 pound craft liner board is the basis for 200 pound Mullen. 200 pound Mullen requires that you have 84 pounds of liner facings. And back in the day, it used a 26 pound semi-chemical medium. And in the 1960s, when people were thinking about how should they price a box or when the buyers were trying to should cost model a box. They could look at the open market pricing for 42 pound craft liner board and 26 pounds of chemical medium. And they could then create their own should cost model like, oh, well, well, if the paper's this much, then I'm not going to pay more than this for the box. And that's, and that's kind of how those two things came about. They were the commodity grade. The problem is today that is not the commodity grade. The commodity grade is lighter than that. And that was a As a result of the shift in the industry, where in 1990 we adopted ECT as an alternative to Mullen, where ECT doesn't require a certain number of pounds per thousand square feet for the facings, it's really can the box pass an edge crush test of whatever size? So 32 ECT, for instance, is one of the commodity grade. I would think that's probably most of what's made like C flute or 32. to fiber box data, 90 % of the boxes made in the US are single wall. And I would be willing to bet that a very high portion, maybe 60%, 50 to 60 % maybe, I don't know. Probably in that 32 or less. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it does the job for most things and uh because there's lifting limitations and you you don't want the box to weigh a hundred pounds when you're done with it, when you're packing it out for the consumer, right? So we want, we want to keep that number under 50 pounds and really make it easy and convenient. Also has to fit on a pallet and fit through a door when you're carrying it. Well, and then there are structural qualities to many of the products that we use. So for instance, if you're a brewery and you have bottles inside the box, the bottles create some of the structure. You don't need the box. You just need a wrapper. If you're a cereal company and you're putting cereal boxes in the box, all of those boxes add structure. You don't necessarily need. But one of the things that we can do coming back to Mountain Fort and the McKee formulation, there's a lot of science that goes into that. Yeah And so you can actually now look at the strength properties of the paper itself and predict ECT with a very high level of certainty. And so once you know the ECT that's predicted, then you can put in the length with depth of the box, the caliper, you put in your kind of your safety requirements. Is it going be stacked in a column or offset? it going to overhang on a pallet? How long will it be stacked? if you're stacking it, right, if you're not gonna do partial shipment. But you can actually predict box compression. All of this in theory before the box is even done. And then again with science, once you've done it, you can see how well did we predict this, right? And so were we right? And then if we weren't right, where did we go wrong? And there are a lot of great tests to help you understand how well you did it making a box. There's a little product called the Chalmers DST, Dynamic Stiffness Tester, and it is a fantastic device to really show how well you can both corrugate the sheet and then also convert that sheet into a box and maintain strength through the entire process. It's an amazing process and a lot of people listening, I haven't talked about this very much, but one of my first jobs was working on the corrugator and also where I got my nickname corrugated. And as you know, I've told that joke a million times, but it's true. And it's such a cool process to watch the paper feed through and the double backer and how the... starch gets applied to the middle sheet. It's incredible to watch. And then all of sudden at the end comes finish sheets that are already scored, ready to go onto the finishing equipment, which is amazing for most people to watch. Like, wow, here we go. We're almost there. is to me, I'm with you. I never tire of seeing a corrugator. I now look at them and I go, wow, because now you've got some corrugators, they're up to 132 inches wide. And they're running at speeds like the run speeds are over 1300 lineal feet per minute. And so you just see this massive sheet of paper running. and what paper companies are able to do these days. It's truly incredible. I really enjoyed that job working at WareHauser, making boxes and learning about the process. I think it's what got me through my, the beginning of my career. Cause I was so young and, you know, just not knowledgeable about packaging other than I, all I knew was corrugated for sure. So, but I think that helped me get through a lot of my first meetings and, relationships. Was there, when you think back on your time doing that, was there a job role or something that you saw that was kind of most insightful that helped you be more successful when you turned into sales? yeah, I really enjoyed watching and learning from the people that would, uh they were called die-mounters and they would make the flexographic print plates and then they would mount them onto the sheet that would get mounted onto the roll and that process is so scientific and incredible. You know, to print a BMC you have to have a piece, a die, a print plate is what we'd call it. It's not a print plate. It's really a flexible, you know, rubber stamp really for those listening who haven't seen the process. But it's incredible how the chemically etched away the parts that don't get printed. And then they have these big areas of print and you need one for each color. I just always I was impressed with how they made those and how they tested them and then how they also made the cutting dies. I thought the cutting dies were like beautiful and a piece of like artwork. And now I know when people say $5,000 for a cutting die, yeah, and here's why. They weigh 100 pounds and they take 20 hours to make and there's an incredible amount of material there. And they're just expensive, they're valuable and they can be used for years. That's exactly right. mean, sometimes millions of impressions they're good for. They're highly engineered. And that's just if you're thinking about what I would say is a kind of a common rotary die. If you think about like, if you've got an advanced flatbed die cutter and you've uh got strippers and blankers to go along with it so that you have this really precise and clean, it just creates so much efficiency down. through the production thing, yeah, it's gonna cost money, but it's gonna get you so much more in the long Yeah, I agree. Running pizza boxes was always one of my favorite jobs. It was hard work, but we would watch them cut through the die press and it was a platen die flat and then they would come out and you'd have to break the bundles manually back when I did it. Now they have machines that do that. And then you run it through a shrink tunnel if the customer wants them shrink wrapped and then you stack them on a a palette, but it was really fun to just, we'd run those for days and just change out the artwork. know, okay, we're running 12 inch pizza boxes, you know, this today. And we've got five print plates, you know, so we're gonna run. And it was just very efficient because setting up the tooling takes a lot of time. It does. And if, if any box buyers have never been to their box plant, like that is something that needs to happen. That gives you a completely different frame of reference to see the time it takes to set the machines up, to see the level of precision that some of the machines can get the speed at which they go. Like these are, mean, these are not inexpensive machines and they do an incredible. and the operator of the machine, their knowledge is so valuable. I think that's where you earn a lot of your respect in the industry is those true partnerships and saying, oh, hey, I want this crew working on it and making sure that it runs perfectly. Cause a lot of the prints very difficult, a lot of die cutting is very intricate. Yeah, this is, this is great to talk about. in flexographic printing, I mean, that guy that's running the press needs to listen, know how to, manipulate the pH and the viscosity of the ink so that it prints properly. You know, he has to know how fast he can run the thing is to know how hard to, to make, make the impression there. This is a, don't want to, I don't want to undervalue it. It's at least a semi skilled trade, if not a skilled trade. Right. This is not, yeah, it's, this is not, is, well I can go do that without any training. No, this is like, you're going to have to spend a few months mentoring under somebody. yeah, years. I know people that worked in that plant for 20 years and they, and more because it's, you know, once you learn this specific machine, you become so valuable to the process and then you can train other people. so yeah, that's a really important topic, but yeah, anybody listening, if you're in the packaging industry, make sure you visit a corrugated plant, see a corrugator run. It's so valuable to your career and your education. Well, let's talk a little bit about kind of the broad spectrum of corrugated as an industry. Any highlights from 2025, anything from this year yet that you're kind of seeing trends you can tell us about? say I'm gonna say the thing that has gotten most people to raise their eyebrows in 2025 we can calculate how many boxes are produced we do that by measuring square footage there are two two ways to measure that one is in tons the other is in square footage and from a square footage standpoint we basically made the same number of boxes in 2025 that we did in 1994. Yeah, I knew you were gonna say that. You're like, wait, what? Well, that can't be right. But it's right. And people say, how can that possibly be? And the answer is for the last 30 years, we've been importing more and more goods from other countries. And all of those things will majority of those things come to us pre-packaged. So when we talk about making America great again and reshoring manufacturing, we really need to kind of pump the brakes and kind of reset our expectations. Currently the National Association of Manufacturers has over 400,000 open manufacturing jobs. Okay, that's great. We want to bring more back but we still have a lot of openings. So how do we do that? We need workers, right? We just wrote in our last box report that even box plants need workers, right? We need more people to be able to show up and to put in a good effort. mean, these are, again, these are pretty good paying jobs for people who may not have a deep education. I was in a box plant earlier this week. They start at $22 an hour. You know, that's where they start. And a good press, a good press worker could make up as much as $35 an hour in that particular plant. And that's before any bonuses and incentives. Right. So, so that's actually a pretty, mean, that, that's going to get that person. mean, $35 an hour is roughly $70,000 a year. That's not a bad gig. And in a box plant, I know it's not sexy, but it's not, it's not easy work. Right. It's yeah. Yeah. it's worth it. It is worth it. You'll need to make sure you have a good pair of ears, hearing protection and some good steel toe boots or something. You want to have all your safety precautions in there, but it's a good job. I remember we talked about safety so much, it became so annoying, I was so looking back, I was very appreciative of how much that organization cared about our safety. And if you ever needed safety gloves or what any kind of equipment, yes, here, they couldn't get it to you fast enough. And they really invested in that education and training. And I appreciate that now as an older person. in the industry, looking back as my 18 year old self thinking, okay, at least they took care of me and made sure I was wearing my earplugs and all this stuff. ah I will say the majority of people that I speak to in this industry take safety like that is paramount, right? They provide the hearing protection, they provide the glasses, they provide the training, they make sure that everybody's equipped to do what they need to do, they track all of this stuff, they don't want lost time accidents, they will do everything in their power to keep everybody safe. Safety is the thing. Now I totally agree. And a lot of the automation equipment uh that's been added is certainly helping with that. did want to, before we get too far down the show, I wanted to see what your thoughts are on moving forward. Do you think, do you see, I know you don't have a crystal ball, you've ordered one, but it's not there yet. Do you see a growth trend or do you see some maybe more reduction in production here in the U S? Well, one of the reasons why we've seen the volume that we've seen in the last year, we kind of have to rewind the tape just a little bit. The pandemic wasn't that long ago. And that's when we saw a huge spike. Demand went through the roof. So why did demand spike? Well, Americans were locked down. A lot of the world was locked down. And when we got locked down, we couldn't go to Taylor Swift concerts. couldn't, you couldn't go do a lot of the things you normally did. And so we, we saw an expansion in real personal disposable income, and that was supplemented by some government stimulus. Well, you can't go spend anywhere else. So what do we do? A lot of people renovated their houses. They bought new furniture. They bought new grills. They bought new bikes. bought and they bought and they bought and they bought. Yeah, a lot of this was online. And so on the one hand, we may have pulled forward some of the spending that we were gonna do in future years because we had nothing else to do with it. On the other hand, You know, it was, that was how we kept the economy going. Right. And we saw an explosion with Uber Eats and DoorDash and things like that. And what we ended up seeing was by 2022, the world was coming back into some semblance of order and the demand started to recede. so demand went down and not only did demand go down, but that real personal disposable income, it started going down too. And so now when you were making decisions about what you were going to do with your money, Hey, I've already got all of these things. What I want to do is go see Taylor Swift. What I want to do is go to Disney world. What I want to do is go to Italy. Right. And so the spending changed. It became right. The second it became different, it was okay. Let's go do the experience. Let's go do the service. And so that spending changed things tremendously. The other thing that really changed things is the addition of things like GLP-1 drugs, the Wigovies and Majaros and Roe and all these. This is something that we've seen in the data. This is something that we look at when we see consumer goods companies, their volume has been going down because Americans are making different decisions these days, right? So that's another big, big kind of headwind for the industry. Then you look at e-commerce now from where we were. five or six years ago. And now Amazon, the big e-commerce giant is sending a lot of things in paper mailers. And they're doing it for several reasons, right? The first, in my opinion, is that they get a better cube through their supply chain, right? It's a smaller package. can handle it differently. The second thing is it's less money. And then lastly, it aligns with some of their climate goals, right? They want to create less waste. So, This is perfect solution for them. It accomplishes everything they're trying to do. But all of these things kind of converge between the lowering of the real personal disposable income, the shifting of where they're spending their money. Now they're spending the money on GLP-1 drugs, so they're not going to go buy snacks. And by the way, when they are spending things online, some of these companies are shipping it in paperback. So all these things are contributing to this decline. And so the question we really have to ask ourselves is if we look in the crystal ball is what's going to happen to real personal disposable income in the future? Is it going to get bigger or smaller and why? And so this year, as we think about this year, you know, right now we're seeing the conflict in Iran. We're seeing gas prices shoot up. We're seeing freight prices shoot up. We're seeing a lot of inflation across a variety of commodities. and there are gonna be ripple effects that are gonna last for at least another 12 to 18 months. yeah, so it's not a great outlook for volume. It's not a bad outlook either, just as we think it's gonna come down again, right? We think that from a alignment of spending to boxes, it's gonna kind of converge and say, yeah, we're gonna be down. Yeah. Well, I think you're right. we'll see how it goes. And we'll see how we can become more efficient at making boxes and keep that trend moving forward. We will definitely see that is for sure. Well, thank you, sir. Appreciate you being on Mr. Fox and uh always love our chats. Thank you. same.