Berry Global Brand Guidelines: An Evansville Cap Maker, Covalence Tapes & Amcor in 2025

Containers for food and dairy in Evansville.

Berry Global began in Evansville, Indiana, in 1967 as Imperial Plastics. The International Directory of Company Histories, in its entry on Berry Plastics, says the young company supplied plastic containers to the growing food and dairy industries at a time when packaging was moving from cardboard, wood, glass and paper to plastic. English Wikipedia adds that it started with three workers and a single injection-moulding machine making aerosol caps.

By the mid-1970s, the same entry says, Imperial Plastics had added design engineers and marketing staff and was making containers for hair care, pet food, chemicals, detergents and toys, along with pry-off pails for paint, sealers and wood stains — the kind of container that sits on a hardware-store shelf.

In 1983 the company was bought by Jack Berry Sr., a Florida real-estate developer and citrus grower, according to the International Directory of Company Histories, and renamed Berry Plastics Corporation. A second plant opened at Henderson, Nevada, in 1987, and in 1988 Berry bought Gilbert Plastics, an aerosol-overcap maker, and moved it from New Brunswick, New Jersey, to Evansville. In 1990 an equity fund managed by First Atlantic Capital of New York became majority owner, with managers keeping a stake.

The 1990s set the pattern that would define the company: growth by acquisition. The directory lists Mammoth Containers of Iowa Falls in 1992, then Sterling Products, a maker of promotional drinking cups, and Tri-Plas, a polypropylene container maker in Charlotte, North Carolina, followed in late 1996 by PackerWare of Lawrence, Kansas, a maker of housewares and lawn and garden products.

Design work was part of the pitch. By the 1990s, the directory says, Berry ran its own product-development department: engineers and marketing staff worked with a customer from the first concept, drawings were prepared on a computer-aided design system, an in-house model shop made thermoformed prototypes, and sample parts came from single-cavity prototype moulds before a full production mould was built.

How a container maker came to make tape.

Tape entered the business through a merger. On 30 March 2007 FoodIngredientsFirst reported that Berry Plastics Group and Covalence Specialty Materials Holding had agreed a stock-for-stock merger, with the combined company to be called Berry Plastics Group; a founding partner of the private-equity firm Apollo Management was quoted welcoming the deal. English Wikipedia describes Covalence as the former Tyco Plastics & Adhesives business, and records the merger as completed in April 2007.

The merger created a Tapes and Coatings Division. A Berry press release dated 25 January 2008, issued from Franklin, Massachusetts, said the division “was created from the merger” of the two companies, and that bulk-bag brands previously in Covalence’s coated-products arm now sat within it. English Wikipedia’s article on the Nashua Corporation says Nashua sold its tape line to Tyco International in 1997 and that it later passed, through Covalence, to Berry.

Today the tape range sits under its new owner, and Amcor’s packaging-solutions website lists tapes under names including Polyken, Patco and Adchem, with product types running from industrial, HVAC and construction tapes to automotive, aerospace and medical tapes. Polyken’s listed range includes corrosion-control and polyethylene film tapes; Patco’s includes surface-protection and wire-harness tapes; Adchem’s includes transfer tapes.

Tape was only one strand. English Wikipedia says that from 2015 Berry ran three divisions — Health, Hygiene and Specialties; Consumer Packaging; and Engineered Materials — and that it kept buying, adding AEP Industries in 2016, Clopay Plastic Products in 2017, Laddawn in 2018 and the British packaging group RPC in July 2019. In February 2024 Berry and Glatfelter announced a plan to combine Berry’s Health, Hygiene and Specialties business with Glatfelter.

Tape, strapping and the trade.

The makers in this guide sell much of their range to people who use tape and strapping at work: warehouse teams sealing cartons, packers securing pallets, contractors masking a wall or sealing a duct. Their catalogues tend to be organised around jobs and materials. Shurtape’s industrial website, for example, sorts its range by trade — construction, HVAC, packaging, marine — while IPG lists pressure-sensitive and water-activated tapes, stretch and shrink films and packaging machinery side by side.

That gives the category a recognisable set of pictures for a designer to study: rolls of tape on their cardboard cores, often stacked by colour or width; cartons running through a case sealer at the end of a packing line; steel or plastic strapping drawn tight around a loaded pallet with a hand tool or a machine; and close-ups of an adhesive face or a cut edge. Some makers, Shurtape among them, give their trade tapes short codes of letters and numbers rather than names.

The trade also meets in person. PMMI’s Pack Expo shows in the United States, interpack in Düsseldorf and FachPack in Nuremberg, which held its 2025 edition in September, gather makers of packaging materials, tapes, strapping and the machines that apply them together, and a maker’s stand there is one of the places its identity is seen at full size.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it now, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. The colours and typefaces shown are our own unofficial interpretation, not any maker’s official palette.

A name kept for eight years.

The company changed its name from Berry Plastics to Berry Global Group in April 2017, English Wikipedia says, citing a Business Wire release and Plastics News. The new name dropped the material from the brand while the business kept its headquarters in Evansville, where, English Wikipedia says, it ran more than 265 facilities worldwide.

Berry Global no longer trades as an independent company. In November 2024 the packaging group Amcor agreed to combine with Berry in an all-stock deal, and on 30 April 2025 Amcor announced that the combination was complete, effective that day. Berry’s shares were delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, according to English Wikipedia, and the old berryglobal.com address now redirects to Amcor’s packaging-solutions website, where Berry’s former product ranges, tapes included, are presented under the Amcor name.

The Berry name therefore survives mainly as history: an Evansville cap and container maker that spent four decades buying other businesses, from cup makers to a tape line, before joining Amcor. Its tape story runs from Nashua’s line through Tyco and Covalence to Berry and, since 2025, to Amcor.

For a design guide, Berry Global shows how a name built by acquisition can be renamed once and then folded into a new owner’s brand. Compare Shurtape and Intertape, two other tape makers in this series. For this guide we use a deep teal, a dark pine and a sage grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Berry Global’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.