Innovation

“There isn’t anything you can make from a barrel of oil, that you can’t make from a bale of grass.”

– Kelly Tiller, Founder

Innovation is at the heart of our company. Starting with the vision of what could be done with locally grown perennial grasses through to the most cutting-edge fiber technology, Genera is reimagining what can be done with a bale of grass. We believe that our significant investment in technology and innovative thinking bring unique benefits to our customers, enabling them to pursue conversion away from plastic packaging.

Genera Innovation Center

Based in Texas, our research and development team pursues the latest advancements in fiber science and technology. This ensures our customers have access to the newest capabilities in molded fiber products. Extensive testing is performed on many food types to understand how molded fiber packaging interacts with the food compared to plastic alternatives. Our team then engineers design solutions that meet or exceed the performance requirements of our customer’s market applications.

Genera is a local company committed to boosting our rural community and adding valuable jobs to the local economy. 

Custom Design + Prototyping

In addition to our robust and growing stock product lines, we offer bespoke design capabilities to fit our customers unique operational and aesthetic needs.

  • In-house design team enables fast turnaround product design and evaluation using state-of-the-art 3D rendering capabilities.
  • Domestic prototyping capabilities deliver rapid evaluation of functional performance and increased speed to market.
  • Efficient conversion from final design to production tooling combined with over 2 billion units annual capacity ensures a short ramp to full scale national supply.
  • Customized stock products with your logo, branding, colors, and graphics through emboss and print.

Specialized Performance

Genera’s innovation team has years of fiber development experience which is deployed to assist customers with unique product performance requirements.

  • Genera has optimized fiber blend and wet end additives to superior performance across a wide range of market application and utilize that recipe for most of our stock product lines.
  • There are several advanced performance recipes that yield industry leading water and grease resistance which are deployed in specific markets that demand these unique attributes.
  • Beyond these proprietary recipes, Genera works with other customers on customized performance packages that may encompass specialized blends of fiber sources, wet end additives and product design.

Product Enhancement

Beyond material and design capabilities, Genera offers product enhancements to reach the most demanding product requirements for barriers and secondary applications or decorations.

  • Film Lamination – most compostable substrates can be utilized
  • Printing – 4 color process artwork
  • Barrier Coating
  • Pad Insertion – Most industry standard pad materials

Quality Assurance

High performance products require diligent inspection to main Genera’s standards for the highest quality.

  • Cutting-edge technology that instantly inspects products, identifies defects, and ensures compliance to stringent quality standards
  • AI and machine learning algorithms that identify patterns for increased efficiency and continuous product improvement.

Food Packaging Market Analysis

Understanding how food interacts with our packaging is key to making improvements and identifying design and material attributes that fuel our innovation.

  • Diligent pursuit of real-life performance requirements enables product innovations to improve molded fiber performance to exceed that of plastic alternatives.
  • Researching how molded fiber packaging can improve shelf life in certain food types.
  • Studying how the inherent cushioning attributes of molded fiber can protect in certain impact scenarios that may cause product failure in plastic alternatives.