Packaging equipment buyers in Cambridge are shopping in a city that once ran the world's largest candy factory. A confectionery manufacturer built the plant at 250 Massachusetts Avenue in 1925-27 and operated it as its sole production site until consolidating elsewhere in 2003; the building, now leased to a pharmaceutical tenant, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. The building never left the neighborhood. That factory sat inside a broader manufacturing base that defined Cambridge through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, concentrated in what's now Kendall Square and East Cambridge, both built originally as the city's industrial core before becoming its biotech hub. The city's manufacturing lineage also included instant-photography, scientific-consulting, computer-networking, and enterprise-software firms that later moved out or wound down as the local economy shifted.

That industrial history has a direct successor in Kendall Square's current cluster of pharmaceutical and biotech manufacturers, several among the largest drugmakers in the world, running production and lab operations blocks from where the old candy factory once stood. Our Pack Series flow wrappers seal individually wrapped candy, bars, and bakery items at speed, the same category of product Cambridge once produced at world-record scale. Our Mars Series vertical form-fill-seal (VFFS) machines bag and pouch powders and granular product for today's pharmaceutical and biotech manufacturers. If your biotech line is moving into a candy-factory-era building, you still need to bring a fill line up fast. We keep flow-wrapping and VFFS equipment in stock for Cambridge producers, and our solutions team works out the fit between the product and the space.