Over a Century of Quality and Recycling

Fredman Bag has been bringing quality bags to the marketplace for over 130 years. The company was established as A. Fredman and Son with the idea to buy, sell and trade used textile bags primarily for feed mills in Southeastern Wisconsin. Today Fredman Bag prints and converts quality custom poly bags and films with a mission aimed at total customer satisfaction. We are SQF certified, ISO 9001 Compliant, a UL Certified printer and a Target approved printer. Additionally, we passed our 2021, 2022 and 2023 SQF Audit with an excellent 98 rating.

In 2023, Fredman Bag joined the Summit Plastics family.

Our mission is to share positive experiences with customers by proactively supporting their needs and consistently creating value in custom packaging solutions and promotional materials. That is why Fredman Bag is committed to providing our customers with safe food contact packaging.

A Clean and Safe Environment

As consumers of the earth’s resources we consider it our responsibility to reduce the environmental impact of our manufacturing and administration processes. This environmentally conscious philosophy has been practiced from our inception in 1889 (recycling used burlap bags for reuse) and continues to drive our commitment to sustainability today. That’s why we are proud to be a Green Tier participant and are committed to our robust recycling program which keeps us Land Fill Free.

Environmental Policy

Careers

Fredman Bag’s success is due to the dedication and commitment of our employees. This is a family business and our employees are truly family. And as we continue to grow, we are eager to welcome great, new additions to our team.

We are extremely proud of the longevity of our employees and are grateful for their dedication to our company. Employees, both new and long-term, enjoy a culture that provides a safe, comfortable, and collaborative work environment. In fact, we have surpassed 1,000 consecutive days with no lost time accidents. It is our goal for employees to go home healthy to their families every day.

Our History

Established as A. Fredman and Son

Historic Fredman Bag logo

Incorporated as Fredman Bag Company at 322 E. Broadway in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Burlap bags were vacuum cleaned and repaired at this facility.

Fredman Bag Company relocates to 330 E. Clybourn Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin in a four-story warehouse building to house expanding inventory and additional used bag processing equipment.

Purchase and installation of first printing press (hand-fed, one bag-at-a-time) for imprinting used burlap and cotton bags.

Historic Fredman Bag logo

Product line is expanded to include closing materials such as wire ties, twines and sewing threads.

Sales coverage is expanded to the upper Midwestern United States, as distribution of textile and multiwall paper bags were added to the product lines. Now serving industrial markets in addition to agricultural.

Historic Fredman Bag logo

Purchase and installation of printing and sewing equipment to manufacture new printed burlap, cotton, and mesh bags.

Product line is expanded to include the distribution of polyethylene film and bags to serve portions of rapidly growing markets

Historic Fredman Bag logo

Fredman Bag Company constructs and relocates to a new 28,000 square-foot manufacturing facility located at 5801 W. Bender Court, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with and eye trained on the future of the ever-growing polyethylene film and bag market.

Purchase and installation of first bag making machinery used to convert polyethylene films. Diversification needed to offset shrinking markets for textile bags and related products.

Historic Fredman Bag logo

Purchase and installation of first flexographic printing press for printing on plastic films to meet the growing demands of more and better print for industrial markets.

Purchase and installation of additional polyethylene printing and bag making machinery as focus swings to polyethylene bags. The customer base continues to grow and sales coverage becomes national.

Fredman Bag Company celebrates its 100th year as a family-owned business. Production of textile bags is discontinued in order to focus manufacturing efforts on value-added flexible packaging. Textile bags continue to be distributed.

Historic Fredman Bag logo

Purchase and installation of machinery to produce zipper bags as the demand for reclosable packaging continues to grow in both retail and institutional markets.

Purchase and installation of six-color, wide-web flexographic press for process printing…allowing us the opportunity to offer customers photographic quality images on their packaging.

Purchase of a new 8-color process printing printing press to serve expanding needs and higher expectations of print-conscious buyers and end-users.

Current logo

Purchase of a 22,000 square-foot building at 5901 W. Bender court as growth continues, creating additional manufacturing and warehousing space, as well as additional bag-making and new slitting/rewinding equipment.

Fredman Bag Company wins its first award for graphic excellence in printing: The Badger.

Installation of our first lamination equipment. The solventless laminator addition provided the ability to start manufacturing laminated products for extended shelf life and other barrier properties.

Approved to be involved in the Wisconsin DNR Green Tier program, which is comprised of a small number of manufacturers in the state. It is a key part of our Environmental Management System and helps drive our sustainability goals.

Green Tier

Installation of our first pouch manufacturing equipment. This provided the capability to convert laminated film structures into pouches. Available features for pouches include stand-up, zipper and header, among others in various substrate configurations.

Conversion of facility lighting to a much more energy efficient system to reduce our carbon footprint.

Removed dumpsters and trash compactors from our facility and went “landfill free”. All waste streams were directed to recycling or engineered fuel and we are still landfill free to this day, continuing our journey in sustainability

Became a UL Certified Printer, which enables Fredman Bag to print the UL symbol on customer packaging.

UL Certified

Received our first SQF certification. This third party audit continues our quest in providing a high level of package quality to our customer base. This certification built on our extensive quality orientation, which was built on a strong foundation with an ISO compliant quality manual already in place.

SQF

Installed our second 8 color wide web flexo press.  This state of the art equipment provides significant additional capacity, as well as improved capabilities and print quality. Concurrently, a solvent recycling system was installed to reduce our waste stream; a continuation of our efforts to be more sustainable.

Addition of two high speed wicketing machines. These machines provide significant additional capacity to the bag manufacturing department, as they operate at much higher speeds while maintaining a high quality level.

Recorded an amazing 1,000 work days with no Lost Time Accidents in January. An achievement that was accomplished entirely due to the dedication to safety by each and every one of our employees.

"We have been working with Fredman Bag for a number of years and they have been great to work with from package design through product delivery. We can always depend on their communication to be accurate and timely."

— Produce Packaging Company