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Home >>> About Us
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| The story of Sonoco |
100 years of packaging
The Southern Novelty Company was founded in Hartsville, South Carolina, USA, on May 10, 1899, with Major James Lide Coker as the first president. Our first product was a cone-shaped paper yarn carrier that was used for winding and transporting yarn. Since most of the textile cones of that day were wooden, paper cones were a novelty.
While Sonoco did not invent the paper cone, our engineers invented new processes to automate the production of paper cones. This automated manufacturing gave Sonoco a competitive advantage and we soon became the leading producer of cones in the United States.
The Southern Novelty Company continued to diversify its product line and add new operations around the country. We continued making paperboard for our paper packaging products and began using recovered paper as a raw material in the 1920s. In 1923, the Southern Novelty Company name was changed in 1923 to Sonoco Products Company, using the first two letters from each word of its original name.
By 1998, Sonoco had become the eighth largest packaging company in the world, with nearly 17,500 team members in 33 countries serving customers in more than 85 nations with a wide array of industrial and consumer packaging solutions. In addition to being a major packaging company, we produce nearly all of our own paperboard, consuming almost two million tons of recovered paper annually.
 The company's identity has been closely tied to its Flying S logo since 1964. The Flying S, which has undergone little change since its origin, was drawn in part from the company's most basic technology, paper winding spirally around a mandrel, the basic manufacturing process for some of Sonoco's signature products--primarily tubes, cores and composite cans. The 1997 modifications to the logo included changing the standard color to a darker blue (known as PMS 280), and changing the typeface to Futura Extra Bold. This trade mark, owned by SPC Resources, Inc., is an arresting logo that is an easily recognizable corporate symbol.
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