Back in 1818, Lorilleux & Cie, a commercial ink maker, made its debut in France. Now, 200 years later, Sun Chemical can trace its roots back to Lorilleux & Cie, as well as many other companies.

Lorilleux & Cie was not the only company that could be traced from the 1800s to Sun Chemical today. In 1830, Samuel Morrill started making inks in his kitchen in Andover, MA. He would later form the Geo. H. Morrill Company, one of the five companies that would become General Printing Inks in 1929 (along with Eagle, Sigmund Ullman, Fuchs & Lang and American), which in turn formed Sun Chemical in 1945.

In 1989, Lorilleux & Cie merged with Coates, itself founded in 1877.

Along the way, Sun Chemical has added numerous ink companies, including Hartmann (1987), Kohl & Madden (1987), US Ink (1993), Zeneca Inks (1996) and Coates Lorilleux (1999). The Performance Pigments division added major names such as Ansbacher-Siegle, Federal Color Labs, American Cyanamid and Bayer. Sun Chemical itself was acquired by DIC Corporation in 1987. Throughout the years, Sun Chemical and DIC have become the largest ink suppliers in the world.

The company has come a long way over the years, from a small operation in a kitchen in Massachusetts to a $3.5 billion company today. The key questions are these:

How did Sun Chemical get to where it is today, how has the industry changed over the years, and where does Sun Chemical head from here. Ink World spoke with the following leaders from Sun Chemical to get their thoughts:

• Myron Petruch, president and CEO of Sun Chemical: Petruch began his career at Sun Chemical Performance Pigments in 2008, where he served as GM of the Pigments Product Division and as president of Sun Chemical Performance Pigments, prior to being named president and CEO of Sun Chemical as of Jan. 1, 2019. He is also an executive officer of DIC Corporation.

• Colin Smith, European product manager, Sun Chemical: Smith began his career in the ink industry at Ault & Wiborg in Liverpool, UK in 1976, and manages the company’s portfolio, including inks and coatings.

• Dr. Bernhard Fritz, product manager, Sheetfed Systems Europe, Sun Chemical: Dr. Fritz began his career at Hartmann in 1985 and has watched as Sun Chemical has grown in Europe, adding companies throughout the continent.

• Edward T. Polaski, VP sales – Americas, Sun Chemical Performance Pigments: Polaski joined Sun Chemical’s pigment business in 1977 and has seen the company evolve from primarily an ink industry supplier to a leader in paints and coatings.

• John Law, managing director, Advanced Materials, Liquid Compounds, Sun Chemical: Law joined Coates in 1980, working on inkjet and screen inks. Coates would acquire Lorilleux in 1987, and Sun Chemical’s 1999 purchase of Coates Lorilleux gave the company a major presence in the digital ink field.

• Tony Bean, marketing manager, UV/EB inks (retired), Sun Chemical: Bean joined Sun Chemical after his sophomore year in college in 1969 and retired in 2016 after 47 years. He was particularly well known for his work in UV/EB inks and coatings.

• Tony Renzi, VP of packaging inks, North American Inks, Sun Chemical: Renzi began his career with Zeneca Inks and joined Sun Chemical in 1980. The addition of Zeneca Inks in 1996 gave Sun Chemical its entrance into the packaging market.

Q. 200 years is quite an accomplishment. What are some key attributes of Sun Chemical that helped achieve that kind of success?

Myron Petruch: “It is always about the employees. People really do matter. I do think that at the end of the day, it is the quality and dedication of our employees who have made Sun Chemical great over many, many years. Even though we are a Fortune 200 company, we still have many of the characteristics of a family-owned company. We have people who have been with us for more than 40 years, so we must be doing something right.”

Colin Smith: “Sun Chemical has always had the best people. We’ve always had people at the top with the right vision and we’ve always had people lower down who can turn that vision into reality. We can all buy the same machinery and the same raw materials, so for me, the difference is always the people.”

Dr. Bernhard Fritz: “I think what Sun Chemical has done better than others is meeting the needs of our customers. This has always been a strength. We do a good job of balancing what the company needs with what the customer needs. We once had too many products and it wasn’t profitable. Being strong at customer service though is critical, that and bringing real value. Value isn’t necessarily the product itself. Each customer’s values are different. The task is understanding what the customer wants and translating what it is that they value and truly need.”

Edward Polaski: “At Sun Chemical we talk about quality, service and innovation. We provide our customers with very good, competitive products and we’re always focused on delivering innovative new solutions to the marketplace. But our ability to out-service our competition is a major key to our success here at Sun Chemical. We get close to our customers and listen to them. Nobody services them better than we do. If we get our salespeople equal product performance and price, we’ll get the business because of the organization’s attitude of servicing our customers’ needs.”

John Law: “Over the years, Sun Chemical has acquired many businesses. For a while, Sun Chemical was operating under many brands and it came to a point where we could no longer operate that way. Our current leadership made a decision to pull our brands together under one brand—Sun Chemical. There has been a lot of collaboration and we have worked hard to meet this goal. I think it has been a fundamentally important development to help our business divisions grow and better integrate with DIC so we can provide a truly global geographic footprint. The ability of our teams at Sun Chemical to execute on projects, develop new technology, and create an exciting team spirit within the company has helped to bring it all together.”

Tony Bean: “In my opinion, our top leadership at Sun Chemical and our focus on new technology are two important keys to our success over the past 200 years. Norman Alexander, who owned the company, was a tremendous leader and really pulled the company together with Gordon MacQuaker as the president. Dan Carlick on the technical side had a huge impact and was a strong driving force on technology. They hired him to start a lab in Carlstadt thanks to Norm Alexander’s vision and understanding that we need to continually invest in better technology moving forward. Bob Bassemir was a true scientist and someone who helped Dan Carlick pull it all together from a technology standpoint. Part of Dan and Bob’s vision was to create UV and electron beam technology. They utilized much of the budget in the early days to develop UV/EB technology. The original drive for UV was to deliver a better sheetfed ink that would dry quicker. Dan Carlick and Bob Bassemir were the driving force behind Sun Chemical’s first to market leadership in UV inks. They partnered with companies to develop vehicle chemistries and UV lamps. They found photoinitiators that would work to help the chemistry go solid instantaneously under the lamps. The leadership and vision toward developing new technology in this way have always been a key reason why Sun Chemical has achieved the success that it has had.”

Tony Renzi: “Sun Chemical has achieved this milestone because of its ability to change. The company has had an uncanny ability to change strategic direction within the printing ink industry. It is always looking for ways to maintain its dominant leadership and it does that by investing in the right people and in technology.”

Q. How has the industry changed over the years and how has Sun Chemical responded to these changes?

Myron Petruch: “Several decades ago, publication printing was king, and it was very profitable. With the coming of the digital age, the drop in the publication industry has been more precipitous than anyone could have imagined 20 years ago. On the flip side, packaging has really taken off tremendously. I think the industry as a whole – inks as well as pigments – have changed from being more of an art form to become more of a science, such as color matching and how they are manufactured. I also think that issues that are important to millennials, such as sustainability and doing what is right for the environment, have really come a long way. I believe that technology in general, such as digital printing, has been evolving over time. When you look at the industry, there has definitely been consolidation and a global push. There are fewer smaller regional companies now, and a lot of the global brand owners want global players that have global capabilities everywhere in the world.”

Colin Smith: “If you look at the business since 1976, I think the two biggest things that have changed are how we service customers and how we produce our products.

When I look back at when I started, we supplied all packaging customers with bespoke matched spot colors. I’m pretty sure we were the first ink company in Europe to start looking at dosing systems for customers and in the 1980s, when the first dosing systems started going in, we manufactured it ourselves. Our own engineers designed and produced a blending system for customers because there weren’t any specialist engineering companies out there like there are today. We placed our technicians on-site to run the complete ink operation for the customer to improve handling and print efficiency, and that was certainly a first for Europe. As well as a great service for the customer, it was a great place for our technicians to be trained. Most of our sales people and technical people of that era all went through in-plants, spending eight hours a day on a customer’s site, learning what they were doing. It was a fantastic place to learn.”

Dr. Bernhard Fritz: “The market has changed so much, and Sun Chemical has always had the foresight to adapt. Thirty years ago, the industry was fragmented. We invested in product development and manufacturing and this helped us a lot as our customers started to consolidate and change the way they did business. The industry changes have not finished. Consolidation will continue. The growth of multi-national converters will continue. Sun Chemical is prepared for this, and customer relations remains the company’s key strength in meeting the needs of our customers, no matter what challenges await them.”

Edward Polaski: “We’ve globalized our pigment manufacturing with the DIC Corporation to deal with the constantly shifting markets globally. We grew significantly over the years with many big successes. We had strong innovators, such as Maurice Carruthers, who helped to bring out improvements and extra value to our flush products. Jack Gormley was instrumental in launching new offerings for the digital inks business. We also capitalized our Red 482 water-based dispersion strength to help us enter the growing agricultural industry in the mid-1980s. We broadened our base portfolio to include pearls, effects, and metallics. Our acquisition of Benda-Lutz gave us a bigger footprint. Now we bring a much broader portfolio to the paint companies and it gives us a nice push toward one-stop shopping instead of customers having to utilize multiple suppliers.”

John Law: “In the past, businesses were based primarily on relationships and communication, and although these aspects of business remain important today, we have seen an evolution towards a more objective structured, technology-based world. Hand typed invoices and printed papers have evolved through the introduction of global IT systems, which has been a huge transformation in how we’ve developed our products and services to the market. This has led us as a company to develop a strategic approach and transform the company. Back then the world was smaller, and branch managers were king. Then the country manager became king. As the business has grown globally, regional responsibilities have evolved. We’re now a global company with local services. Regulatory issues will continue to affect our future and Sun Chemical has stayed ahead of the curve by maintaining and delivering a higher standard toward safety than before. Sun Chemical has diversified. The printing world has been difficult with declining markets, but Sun Chemical’s investment in security, brand protection and digital technology are examples of how we are adapting to an ever-changing world. I’ve been impressed with how our current management has transformed Sun Chemical into a more structured company, able to better adapt to changes in the market.”

Tony Bean: “In the 1970s, I remember that we were competing against players in the market who were huge. The Inmont Company was the #1 company in the world based on size. They were ahead of us in every way, but they were so big, they were slow to respond to customer’s needs. Then as the years passed, we became number one and even bigger. It was a constant worry for us to make sure we didn’t treat our customers in that way; that they got the service we provided before the various mergers and acquisitions. I think our response toward delivering that service was very good and it is something I take great pride in as an employee at Sun Chemical.”

Tony Renzi: “The industry has moved from smaller shops and smaller corporations to mega-global companies that don’t specialize in one thing. They do it all. They print everything now - all applications in every country. Mom and Pop shops have now turned into mega international corporations. Sun Chemical, in turn, has responded by delivering solutions that meet their needs, from graphic improvement to specialized effects. We offer functional solutions to packaging, from color to coatings and other special effects. Our ability to respond to market needs and the changing industry is a hallmark of Sun Chemical’s leadership.”

Q. What is your outlook on the future of Sun Chemical?

Myron Petruch: “I’m extremely bullish about Sun’s future. Clearly, there are some challenges, particularly in the publication market, but there is a plethora of opportunities in a lot of the specialty areas such as security inks and digital inks. We have grown exponentially in the pigments area, in the cosmetics area, in the effects area, and in our advanced materials area. There are a lot of excellent technologies out there. I think with our innovations and R&D, we have been able to grow quite nicely. We have been expanding quite aggressively in faster-growing markets like Latin America and Eastern Europe. We are continually doing a product portfolio review, to stay ahead of the curve and upgrade our portfolio. I think we have a very nice portfolio now. We are the leader in inks and in pigments in several different areas, and I anticipate a very good future, hopefully, another 200 years.”

Colin Smith: “Sun Chemical needs to keep its market focus because listening to customers and brand owners is the only way we can keep supplying the products and technology the customers want. It’s especially important that we keep focused on our customers and we keep innovating new ways of making our products more efficient. The key is making our customers more efficient and making sure our customers trust our technology and our people. That’s what we’ve done over the last 20 or 30 years and that’s why we’re still here.”

Dr. Bernhard Fritz: “It has been interesting to see how my career, Sun Chemical’s growth, the world economy at large and the industries we serve all operate as a clock. Similar to how I enjoy reviewing processes, it is also interesting to see how these gears in a clock fit together to achieve so many amazing things. I’m thankful I could be one of those cogs in the clockwork.”

Edward Polaski: “The market is continually changing. Mergers and acquisitions are going to continue in all the industries we serve. There will be geographic growth. We have strategies and tactics in place for growth regions, such as Latin America and Asia and beyond. We do an excellent job of holding our own in our markets and we’re staying ahead of the curve in vertical markets that we see as growth areas. I look forward to watching Myron Petruch and Mehran Yazdani’s progress toward helping Sun Chemical and DIC Corporation continue in truly globalizing the work we are doing both in pigments and advanced materials. I think Sun Chemical has a very exciting future ahead.”

John Law: “I’m optimistic about our future. The industry has many challenges. The publication market is declining and there are lots of changes in the industry. Packaging, for example, is a big focus for everyone in the company. Diversification of Sun Chemical’s services and a combination of products from DIC will be good for the future. We’re exploring all markets and making sure we’re seeing the opportunities. We are in a strong position for many years to come. The future should be really bright.”

Tony Bean: “If I had the chance to go back in time, I would do it all again. I had a wonderful career at Sun Chemical and feel fortunate for the time I had there. I really admired Dan Carlick and Bob Bassemir. Dan’s vision and technology were responsible for alcohol-soluble inks for flexography and UV/EB commercialization and so much more. It was phenomenal to be a part of his vision.”

Tony Renzi: “Our current leadership has a strategic vision that goes far beyond the ink that we sell to standard publications systems. Their leadership and vision will continue to give us the latitude to provide our customers with the solutions they need far beyond what they can imagine right now. The future is bright. I believe our strategic direction is solid. We’ll continue to look at how the market is moving and how to innovate. We continue to invest in technology and R&D so we’re positioned properly for the ever-changing market needs. There is a bright future ahead with electronic packaging, for example. Having that vision and staying ahead of the curve will keep us going strong.”