Green Bay Packaging

Green Bay Packaging is a family-owned paper and packaging manufacturer headquartered at 1700 North Webster Court in Green Bay, Wisconsin, operating mills, corrugated plants and recycling operations across the United States. Its Arkansas Kraft Division mill in Morrilton produces kraft linerboard from both virgin and recycled fiber and employs roughly 620 people. The company is a construction client at scale as well as a manufacturer. Its Project PowerPack at Morrilton is a capital program worth more than $1 billion that replaces the mill’s recovery boiler and biomass boiler infrastructure and adds an electric turbine generator, all while the mill keeps running. Groundbreaking was held in June 2025 with completion targeted for the first quarter of 2028, running about 1,200 contractors at peak.

The company dates to 1933 and to George and Marguerite Kress. It is now in its third generation of family ownership, with William F. Kress as chairman and chief executive since 2019, and employs more than 5,000 people across upwards of forty facilities in sixteen states, plus a joint venture division in Mexico City.

For anyone tracking construction demand rather than packaging, the useful fact is how often Green Bay Packaging builds. The new Green Bay mill, delivered under the internal name Project WolfPack after a 2018 groundbreaking, was the first new paper mill built in Wisconsin in more than thirty-five years. In 2021 it became the first paper mill anywhere to earn UL’s Net-Zero Water environmental validation. In 2023 the company opened a 550,000-square-foot greenfield plant in Tulsa and replaced a fifty-year-old Fort Worth facility with a new 600,000-square-foot corrugator plant. Acquisitions added Interstate Packaging in Albert Lea, Minnesota in 2022 and SMC Packaging Group in Springfield, Missouri in 2024.

Upstream, the Fiber Resource Division manages more than 450,000 acres of timberland in Arkansas.

Product lines run through corrugated packaging, e-commerce and retail-ready packaging, folding cartons, in-store displays, coated label stock and the mill operations that feed them. The coated products business alone runs three production sites and four converting and distribution facilities.

Certifications stack up on the fiber and food-safety sides: SFI Certified Sourcing, SFI Chain-of-Custody and Forest Management, FSC Chain-of-Custody under FSC-C021629, ISO 9001 registration since 1999, and BRCGS and SQF programmes for food-contact packaging. The Green Bay mill took FSC chain-of-custody certification for 100 percent recycled containerboard in June 2008, among the earliest in the US paper industry.

One piece of continuity: George Kress named his first paper machine after his wife, and the 2020 replacement still carries the name Marguerite K. More than 200 veterans, active-duty personnel and military spouses work for the company.