Greif history

The company was founded in Cleveland in 1877 as "Vanderwyst and Greif" by Charles Greif and his partner Albert Vanderwyst.

In the wake of Vanderwyst’s death in 1882, the company changed its name to “Greif Bros.

Greif’s reputation for sturdy products for heavy construction and manufacturing led it to become the largest cooperage firm in the United States by 1908, and it strengthened that brand by purchasing timberland to harvest its own raw materials.

John Raible (later characterized by William Baldwin of Forbes as "a wealthy investor with enough other interests to make cooperage only a sideline") took over from the founding Greif brothers in 1913.

In 1923, for instance, Greif released a new product offering-a 55-gallon bitumen steel drum.

By 1926, Greif owned 216 manufacturing plants and eight divisional offices, as well as timberlands, logging equipment, sawmills, and cooperages.

The company also boosted its container capabilities with the acquisition of an interest in Brooklyn's Carpenter Container Corp. in 1948.

From there, he spearheaded an initiative to expand Greif’s product line to include steel and fiber containers, and by 1955, the company officially transitioned away from its cooperage roots to focus on modern industrial packaging.

By 1959, Greif’s sales had fully bounced back from the transition, and over the next decade, those sales numbers more than doubled thanks to Dempsey’s actions.

By 1960, the company had transitioned away from wood-based products to better suit modern industrial packaging needs.

Although Dempsey eliminated half of the company's 240 factories by 1963, he parlayed Greif Bros.' relatively small, but widespread, plants into a competitive advantage.

In 1964, for instance, Greif bought blow-molding technology from Haveg Industries, which enabled the company to produce liners for its steel and fiber drums to create a new line of insulated products.

Michigan Packaging was founded in 1967 and grew into a corrugated sheet board company with three plants in the eastern United States.

The company formally recognized its exit from the barrel-making business by dropping "cooperage" from its name in 1969.

Instead, the company acquired 50 percent of Macauley & Co. and its Virginia Fibre Corp. when they were created in 1974.

Annual profits increased at an average of three percent each year to a peak of $30.3 million in 1988.

The reduced profitability was attributed to high capital investments ($66 million in 1989 alone), raw materials price increases, customers' price sensitivity, and increased global competition in Greif's primary markets.

But while sales continued to increase fairly steadily in the waning years of the decade and into the early 1990s, Greif's net income declined by more than one-fourth to $22.1 million in 1990.