As published in Development News - May 1, 2018
Tolco’s Linwood Avenue operations
Tolco expanding
family-owned business
Company adds new products, employees, and $1.5M of new investment
Tolco Corporation, a family-owned manufacturer in Toledo, has invested over $1.5 million for the construction of a new 17,000 square foot warehouse facility with three new truck bays. Rudolph Libbe was the general contractor and Mark Shambarger of Toledo-based Coger/Shambarger Architects Inc. designed the building.
Construction on the facility began last year in mid-May and was completed during the fourth quarter, with occupation taking place in mid-November.
The company invested in new equipment that included a high-reach forklift, pallet stacker, pallet wrapping machine, and a number of other items that were purchased to service the new warehouse.
Will Lewis, vice president of Tolco, said, “Tolco continues to add new products and grow our business. After years of occupying the same buildings, we needed more space to accommodate the changes in our business. We felt that a high bay warehouse would give us the flexibility to store more products and repurpose some of the areas that were previously used for storage. The main objective of the addition was to create efficiencies in our operations and add flexibility to our storage and manufacturing capabilities.”
According to Lewis, the expansion also gave Tolco the space to bring back jobs that it had previously outsourced with four full-time employees hired in October since the company was able to do the outsourced work in house again. The company currently has 60 employees.
Tolco manufactures trigger sprayers, pumps, faucets, containers, and a number of other chemical dispensing products.
“A large number of our products are sold into the janitorial and sanitary supply industry, but we also service the beauty supply, animal health, foodservice, automotive detailing, and office supply industries,” said Lewis.
William E. Spengler founded the company in 1961, with one product – the D-22 drum pump – which it still sells today. In the years that followed, Tolco began developing the products that would define its catalogs. The D-22 was followed by the 320 trigger sprayer, the 942 pump-up sprayer, and today’s award-winning line of EcoChoice® products.
When speaking of Tolco’s success, Lewis noted, “Our industry has seen a significant increase in consolidation and private equity investment over the past decade and Tolco has chosen to remain an independent, family-owned business. As a family-owned business we are able to offer a more personal level of service while providing rapid processing of orders with very high fill rates.”
According to Lewis, the company is committed to providing exciting, innovative products well into the future.
