Kruger Products Brand Guidelines: Scott Paper Canada, Cashmere & SpongeTowels

A Montreal paper family and an American tissue name.

Kruger Products is the tissue business of the Kruger group of Montreal, and its story starts with paper distribution. The company says Kruger Paper Company Limited, a wholesale paper distributor, was founded in Montreal in 1904 by Joseph Kruger. English Wikipedia’s article on the parent, Kruger Inc., gives the same year and founder and says the founder’s son, Gene H. Kruger, became president in 1928 and took the business into newsprint, paperboard and tissue. Kruger Inc. is a private company owned by the Kruger family, according to the same article.

Several of today’s mills are older than the Kruger connection. The company traces its Crabtree, Quebec, plant to Edwin Crabtree and Sons, which began operating in 1905, and its New Westminster, British Columbia, plants to Westminster Paper Mills, which started in 1922. It says the Kruger side acquired Crabtree in 1957, Sherbrooke in 1978 and Gatineau in 1988.

The consumer business came from Scott Paper. Scott Paper Limited was the Canadian subsidiary of the American Scott Paper Company; after Scott Paper merged with Kimberly-Clark in 1995, the Canadian arm was sold to Kruger, English Wikipedia says. Kruger Products dates the purchase of Scott Paper’s Canadian operations to 1997 and calls it the start of its consumer tissue business in Canada. Under the arrangement Wikipedia describes, Kruger could use several Scott brand names in Canada until June 2007 and received a long-term licence for Scotties, because Kimberly-Clark already owned Kleenex. The company’s own pages still state that Scotties is a Kimberly-Clark trademark used under licence.

The business kept the Scott Paper name for a decade. The company says Scott Paper changed its name to Kruger Products in 2007, the year the curling championship it sponsors became the Scotties Tournament of Hearts. Its headquarters are in Mississauga, Ontario. In 2012, the company says, KP Tissue Inc., which holds an equity interest in Kruger Products, began trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange; Wikipedia describes KP Tissue as a separate, publicly traded holding company, also based in Mississauga.

Cashmere, SpongeTowels and a curling championship.

The licence deadline reshaped the products Canadians see on the shelf. With the Scott names due to go, the company moved its bathroom tissue from Cottonelle to Cashmere starting in 2004 and its paper towel from ScotTowels to SpongeTowels starting in 2005, according to its history page. Its Canadian consumer range now rests on Cashmere, Purex, Scotties and SpongeTowels. A further brand, Bonterra, launched in 2022; the company describes it as made from 100 per cent recycled paper with Forest Stewardship Council certification and sold in plastic-free packaging. In the United States it sells White Cloud, a brand it says it relaunched there in 1999.

Cashmere has carried the company’s most visible design project. The company says the White Cashmere Collection made its debut in 2004 with work from Canadian fashion designers, that the collection’s fashion show reached its tenth year in 2013, and that it marked the collection’s 20th anniversary in 2023. Its marketing has been rewarded in its home market too: the company says it won five Cassies awards, the Canadian advertising-effectiveness prizes, in 2012, and it launched a campaign called “Unapologetically Human” in 2020.

Packaging is still changing. In November 2026 the trade site Tissue Online North America reported that Kruger Products had launched an upgraded SpongeTowels UltraPro paper towel across Canada and introduced redesigned packaging across the whole SpongeTowels range. The new visual identity is meant to highlight the brand’s “Sponge Pockets” technology and help shoppers pick the product that suits them, the report said, citing the company, which said the changes were developed with the Canadian market in mind.

Away from home, the Kruger PRO division supplies hotels, restaurants and property managers under brands including Embassy and White Swan. Its range covers paper towels, bathroom and facial tissue, napkins and wipers, along with dispensers and hand-care products, the company says. Kruger Products also makes private-label tissue for retailers in Canada and the United States.

Sponsorship is the longest thread. English Wikipedia says the national women’s curling championship has been sponsored by the company since 1982, when it was first held as the Scott Tournament of Hearts, and that it took the Scotties name in 2007. The company calls it one of the longest sponsorships of amateur athletics in Canadian history.

Design and documentation.

Tissue and hygiene-paper makers mostly sell under names that are not their own. The corporate group is often a holding name, and shoppers meet it through a portfolio of consumer brands: Essity’s brands page lists TENA, Tork, Libero, Lotus and Zewa, each with a short category label and a link to its own website, while Sofidel puts Regina first and runs separate Regina sites for seven European countries alongside national names such as Sopalin, Le Trèfle and Hakle.

Consumer pack design follows those brand families rather than the parent. Brand names travel across toilet paper, kitchen towels and handkerchiefs, and some identify themselves by a physical detail: Sofidel says its KittenSoft tissue is recognisable by a heart-shaped embossing. Many brands came to their current owners through acquisitions, so a group’s portfolio often mixes a home-grown house brand with bought national names that keep their local identities.

The away-from-home side looks different again. Here the product is often a system for washrooms and other busy places, pairing paper with dispensers. Essity describes Tork as tissue and dispenser systems for professional and high-traffic environments and says more than 30 million Tork dispensers are refilled regularly; Sofidel lists away-from-home products as one of four business lines, next to its consumer brands, private label goods for retailers and parent reels, the large semi-finished reels sold to other converters.

The corporate websites then speak to a different audience: investors, job seekers, suppliers and journalists. Their pages typically set out the brands, the mills and the owners. Sofidel tells its story decade by decade from its first facility in 1966, and Essity explains its business areas and its 2017 origin as a spin-off from SCA. Sustainability sections on forests, water and plastics sit alongside those histories, written in each company’s own words.

Ten plants from British Columbia to Tennessee.

Kruger Products presents itself as a manufacturer. Its locations page lists corporate headquarters in Mississauga and papermaking or converting sites at New Westminster in British Columbia; Scarborough and Trenton in Ontario; Gatineau, Crabtree, Lennoxville and Sherbrooke in Quebec; and Memphis, Tennessee. The Crabtree site handles deinking and pulping as well as papermaking and converting. The company says it runs 10 manufacturing plants, that its papermaking capacity is just over one-third of Canada’s tissue capacity, and that it is the only tissue company with manufacturing in Western Canada; those figures and claims are its own. Products labelled as made in Canada, it notes, are made with domestic and imported materials.

Investment in machines runs through the company’s timeline. It says it bought a large plant in Memphis in 2002, its first US manufacturing base, and started a through-air-dried (TAD) tissue machine there in 2013. A new paper machine followed at Crabtree in 2017, and in 2021 a TAD machine was commissioned at a new plant in Sherbrooke, from which the company launched premium bathroom tissue and paper towels. In 2014, it says, it bought the Canadian converting assets of Metro Paper Industries to grow its away-from-home business.

The company says it became the first Canadian tissue manufacturer to earn Forest Stewardship Council certification, in 2011; Wikipedia’s Kruger Inc. article dates the group’s FSC certification to March 2011. Its sustainability programmes have run in named stages, from Sustainability 2015, launched in 2010, to Reimagine 2030, launched in 2021, which it calls its third such initiative.

For a design guide, Kruger Products shows how a company can move a whole shelf of household names to new brands without losing its place in the aisle: Cashmere and SpongeTowels replaced Scott names on a deadline, while Scotties stayed under licence. Compare Georgia-Pacific, a US tissue maker with its own family of household brands, and Clearwater Paper, which made private-label tissue before selling that business in 2024. For this guide we use a deep deep blue, a soft blush and a teal with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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