Portland's scrap-steel industry predates World War II, and several steel and metal-recycling companies are still headquartered in or run major operations out of the city today. That industrial base got a second wind during World War II, when a shipbuilding boom drove a sharp rise in the city's population and cemented Portland as a heavy-manufacturing center on the Pacific coast. That manufacturing workforce is still here, and it's what the city's current food, beverage, and consumer-goods producers now draw on to run packaging lines at scale.

Portland's economy today runs on technology, athletic and outdoor brands, shipping, and craft industries, including a nationally known craft-brewing and food scene. Packaging automation for that mix of producers spans Pack Series flow wrappers and vertical form fill seal (VFFS) baggers for snack foods and baked goods, premade-pouch machines for coffee, granola, and craft-beverage mixes, and automatic case packers that move bottled and canned product into cases at brewery speed. A craft producer growing past its original batch size can run the same VFFS baggers and pouch machines at higher volume without swapping equipment. The metro area is also a business cluster for outdoor-gear and footwear-company headquarters, whose distribution operations depend on case erectors and our PackMaster cobot palletizers to move product at volume. The equipment breakdown for craft-beverage, snack, and outdoor-gear lines lives on our Oregon locations page, our food and beverage industry page, and our solutions page.