A medical-supply manufacturer with about 650 workers and a wire-and-cable producer with roughly 1,500 anchor Waukegan's industrial base today and its appetite for packaging automation, according to the city's 2023 financial report. That combination sits inside a genuinely industrial port town: Waukegan's harbor still handles building-material shipments of gypsum board and cement for several manufacturers, a role that traces back to when a major wire-and-steel producer ran a large plant here and an outboard-motor manufacturer built engines on Waukegan Harbor for decades. The port never gave that up. The city still reads differently from its wealthier North Shore neighbors, precisely because it kept a working industrial waterfront instead of turning fully residential.

Waukegan's medical-supply manufacturers are the kind of buyer our stick pack and checkweigher lines were built to serve. On that line, a checkweigher verifies every sealed sachet against spec before a case leaves the dock, catching a variance issue before it reaches a hospital or clinic that can't accept it. Upstream, our EliteWeigh multihead weighers portion each dose of powder, gel, or liquid by weight before a stick pack machine seals it into the single-dose sachet a growing medical-supply line needs. Waukegan runs on that same dock discipline: the harbor still moves gypsum and cement shipments on schedule, and a packaging line here has to hold to the same standard. We keep the stick pack machine and the checkweigher in stock rather than building either to order, and our solutions team sizes a line for Waukegan's medical-supply and industrial shippers alike.