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Tom Haglin, owner and CEO of Lindar Corp., won the Society of Plastic Engineers (SPE) 2019 Thermoformer of the Year award, which will be presented at the SPE Thermoforming Conference in Milwaukee in September. Haglin’s career in the thermoforming industry is noteworthy for ´óÏó´«Ã½ growth, job creation, innovation and community impact.

“I am extremely honored to be the recipient of this award,” Haglin says. “Our success and longevity at Lindar speak to our history that began with the first company that Ellen and I acquired twenty-six years ago. Over the years, we have had a motivated, capable team driving the ´óÏó´«Ã½ forward. It was the continual striving for excellence from our entire team that led to our shared growth and success.”

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Under Haglin’s leadership, Lindar has grown to 175 employees. It operates nine roll-fed machines, eight sheet-fed formers, six CNC routers, four robotic routers, one label line, and one extrusion line in its 165,000-square-foot manufacturing facility—driving annual revenues exceeding $35 million.

Haglin’s commitment to innovation includes a number of patented products and technological breakthroughs in packaging. He also partnered with Dave and Daniel Fosse of Innovative Packaging to create Intec Alliance, which eventually was fully absorbed into the Lindar ´óÏó´«Ã½.

“Prior to our earlier partnership, Lindar’s manufacturing primarily involved custom, sheet-fed thermoforming for its OEM customers,” says Dave Fosse, director of marketing at Lindar. “As Intec Alliance, we connected Lindar with a new market opportunity—a proprietary, thin-gauge, roll-fed food packaging product line that is now marketed under the Lindar brand name.”

The Haglins’ purchased Lakeland Mold in 2012 and rebranded it to Avantech, with Tom as CEO. As a producer of tooling for the rotational molding and thermoforming industries, Avantech was relocated to a new facility in Baxter in 2016 and has expanded its CNC machining equipment, as well as adding personnel. 

The investment in Avantech, combined with Lindar’s product design and thermoforming capabilities, has also spurred the development of several new proprietary product lines, as well as the establishment of in-house rotational molding capability at the recently launched TRI-VEN, also in Baxter.