Art Gustafson, Founder/President

Art Gustafson is widely considered to be the leading pioneer of today’s automatic heat seal and thermoforming industry and, indeed, the father of the rotary automatic heat seal machine. As a young man, he discovered his natural talent for mechanics working on his family’s Illinois farm. He joined Plastofilm Industries (Wheaton, Ill.) in 1954, starting in the die shop and subsequently moving up the engineering and management ladder. In 1961, because he wanted to run his own business and develop his own equipment line to fill what he saw as gaps in the industry, he founded Alloyd Company. As a one-man operation, Gustafson designed, tooled, fabricated and then introduced his six-station rotary machine, the Alloyd Model 6SCBE in 1966.. It became the standard of the industry and is still in use all over the world.     In 1989, after building Alloyd to a 320-employee company, Gustafson sold the company. (Alloyd now operates as a division of SCA Packaging North America). Gustafson re-entered the industry he had so influenced by forming Algus Packaging, Inc., in 1995 with new concepts for packaging equipment he wanted to build and bring to market.   Today, Gustafson relies on his management team to handle the day-to-day administration of his company. This frees up time for him to devote his expertise and insights to the benefit of Algus customers. For example, the new EASYLoadR™ feed system just introduced at PACKEXPO 2005 is the direct result of a concept for an ergonomic, high-output machine he sketched out during a sales call to solve a customer’s problem.