Silk, beer, locomotives, and firearms all rolled out of Paterson, and that manufacturing intensity is why VFFS bagging, case packing, and packaging automation still run through the city's food and beverage producers today. Alexander Hamilton's Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures founded Paterson in 1791 to harness the Great Falls of the Passaic River, one of the nation's first planned industrial cities. By the late 19th century the silk trade had earned Paterson its 'Silk City' nickname, built on Italian immigrant weavers whose six-month strike in 1913 shut the mills down. A locomotive and machine works once built railroad engines near the falls, an early firearms operation ran in the city before relocating to Hartford, Connecticut, and a local brewery turned out 75,000 barrels of beer a year before Prohibition closed it. That base thinned through the 20th century, and by 1983 Paterson ranked as the fifth poorest city in the country.

We build Mars Series VFFS baggers and case packers for producers who are still packing by hand: machines that form, fill, and seal bagged product, and packers that build and load finished cases. You're filling and sealing that by hand today; the Mars Series line takes the job off your floor. Downtime isn't an option once volume grows. Our case study on how a food producer scaled production shows what that upgrade looks like. Our New Jersey location page and food and beverage industry page cover what we serve regionally, our VFFS packaging machine and automatic case packer categories detail individual machine specs, and our solutions page covers what a hand-packing operation can expect once it moves to a Mars Series line. Paterson's mills built the city's first industrial identity two centuries ago; we keep no office on those same silk-district streets, but we work directly with North Jersey producers to spec, install, and support equipment sized to their volume.