More Than One Billion Components to Support COVID-19 Vaccines, Treatments and Diagnostics
In 2020, COVID-19 drastically changed the lives of millions across the world and WestRock’s mission to innovate boldly and package sustainably became, and has remained, more important than ever. As our customers faced the challenges set by the spread of a global pandemic, our healthcare business stepped up to serve partners across North America, Europe and Asia from over 50 strategically located manufacturing sites, offering an unrivaled range of packaging solutions to support COVID-19 vaccines, treatments and diagnostics.
These solutions include:
- Folding cartons and multi-component kits
- Specialty labels for vials and trays
- Pharmaceutical literature
- Product information brochures
- Cold chain solutions for secondary packaging
- Corrugated shipping containers
- Distribution services
In the years since 2020, we’ve taken the systems we created during the pandemic and continued to build and innovate, allowing us to deliver solutions for our customers greatest supply chain and sustainability challenges. Here’s a snapshot of what we achieved during unprecedented times, and how it’s paved the way for what we’re achieving today.
Supply Chain Assurance
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic our healthcare team worked around the clock to safeguard our supply chain in extraordinary circumstances, ensuring the safe and timely delivery of critical packaging materials. We partnered with logistics experts, transportation providers, healthcare leaders and government stakeholders to ensure vaccines, treatments and diagnostics reached our communities.
Today we still believe that reliable delivery of packaging materials makes a vital difference, not only to our customers, but to their patients. We take our commitment to reliability seriously, focusing on vertical integration and providing a range of products with a global reach. Our facilities are strategically placed near manufacturing hubs in healthcare to ensure that our customers' most critical needs are being met, no matter what.
Innovation
During the pandemic, we applied our world class innovators to engineer a range of high-speed applications and easy-to-assemble multi-component packs for distributing diagnostic kits in massive quantities. In 2020, when Michigan State University was looking to welcome back students and faculty as safely as possible, WestRock partnered with the School of Packaging to develop a customized, branded kit to support the school’s Early Detection Program, designed to detect asymptomatic people through saliva testing and mitigate the spread of the virus. By early 2021, the lab had scaled up capacity to handle 15,000-20,000 samples per week. Today we continue to innovate with Advanced Digital Adherence Technology (DAT) packaging that allows data driven adherence feedback, enabling early intervention during non-adherence events and improving the accuracy of efficacy data during clinical trials.
Commitment
We celebrate the way our global team rallied, working 24/7 across multiple business units within the supply chain to safely deliver on the most important example of healthcare packaging needs in our lifetime, and we continue to honor that commitment to quality products and service today by partnering, expert-to-expert, with our customers to develop thoughtful and innovative solutions to their greatest challenges.
In 2024, we’re proud to provide the latest patient centric designs, solutions to replace plastic packaging components, and robust support for drugs making the transition to over-the-counter in the multi-channel consumer goods space.
WestRock is proud to have played a role in serving our communities during such a challenging time, and we strive to apply the same level of dedication, care and innovation to the challenges of today’s ever-changing market. When asked about our healthcare program, Sr. Marketing Manager Steven Linde said, “When it comes to innovating for our healthcare customers, driving sustainability shares priority with improving the patient experience - Our business is fiber-based packaging, but our strength is problem-solving, and we are committed to providing solutions for our customers’ most critical packaging challenges by developing unique solutions when needed and leveraging our global resources to execute effectively and precisely to maximize the value delivered. When you partner with WestRock, our expertise is your advantage.”
About WestRock Healthcare
While our team was delivering packaging solutions to fight the pandemic, we also maintained our commitment to other customers whose products help fight other life altering or ending illnesses. Additionally, we stayed focused on the long-term health of our business, making investments in our facilities to improve our capabilities and efficiency.
We believe packaging plays a vital role in making healthcare more patient-centric, and we begin our innovation process with consumer insights, partnering with our customers to scale our unmatched suite of packaging solutions from design to manufacturing, until it lands in their facilities. We also offer a full range of brand security, serialization, and passive and active brand security solutions that protect products, drive adherence and enhance patient experience.
