Trilla Steel Drum

Source: Manufacturing Digital

Date :02/07/2007 13:33:02

For family-owned Trilla Steel Drum, the basic shape hasn’t changed in more than 60 years, but the uses and specialized designs of its steel barrels have kept the company constantly relevant

Written and produced by James Buchanan & Patrick Harlow

Manufacturing steel drums may seem like a fairly straight forward business to be in, but for Lester Trilla, president of Trilla Steel Drum, his cutting edge company is something of a family affair.

“Trilla is a family-owned business. I am the third generation, and my son, who works here, is the fourth generation, with my daughter, who works here as well,” he says. “It’s hard to say the exact date the company was founded, but it was in the late 1930s.”

The company’s website describes its inauspicious birth as comprised of a $500 stake and a drafty garage on Chicago’s bustling Southwest side, from which the company eventually blossomed into a major Midwest supplier of steel drums.

Trilla goes on to tell the story, “My grandfather was always in the barrel business. In fact, shortly after arriving in this country he was employed by a cooper making wooden barrels.

“Then, in the late 1930s, he went off on his own and started a business reconditioning wooden barrels. But then, World War II came along, and with that, steel barrels became the standard for the war effort. So the company reconditioned steel barrels.

“By the late 1950s, I believe it was 1959, we got into the manufacture of the metal barrels, and in 1976 we sold the reconditioning business,” Trilla says.

Since then the company has been all about finding better ways to make better steel barrels to exacting standards for a number of very specific applications.

“All we make are 55-gallon steel drums, but there are about 75 different versions of that,” says Trilla. “There is what we call an open-head drum, which holds viscous materials such as paints or food products such as chocolate. Then there is the tight-head drum, which has a non-removable cover that is basically a typical oil drum that people are familiar with.

“Collectively, we manufacture about 2 million drums per year out of our two manufacturing locations in Fenton, Missouri, and here in Chicago.”

While one might think of a steel barrel as being a ubiquitous carrier of numerous products, Trilla has targeted his company to producing specialized barrels for relatively narrow markets.

“We’re targeted toward more complicated products, such as chemically resistant drums with various protective coatings,” he says. “Seventy-five percent of what we produce is coated in order to protect the products within the drum from the metal. For example, if the product is corrosive and causes the metal to rust we will apply a coating to prevent that. Or, in the instance of food products, the steel can be coated to protect it from imparting a taste to the contents.”

The coatings, Trilla says, are generally a spray - on application with particular properties to make it resistant to various chemicals or to carry various foods.

The specialized nature of the barrels the company makes, adds Trilla, is something the company evolved into.

“Over the years we gravitated out of the commodities market, which is more of a low-cost, high-volume market, though we still do some work for commodity products,” he says. “We still need the volume, but we have gravitated toward higher quality, more specialized drum manufacturing.”

Rather than mass producing barrels and sending them out to be filled with whatever the customer puts in it, Trilla barrels are essentially customized to carry particular products with unique properties and/or requirements.

For example, one customer produces high-end custom motorcycles that require a very expensive and specialized paint. This one customer may not go through hundreds of thousands of gallons of paint in a year, but the paint must be protected and the drum must meet those very specialized needs.

Another customer coats medical supplies with a very expensive product that cannot have any kind of contamination in it. Again, this customer may not go through huge numbers of barrels, but it must be sure that the barrels used are capable of meeting unique specifications.

Trilla adds that he has a number of skilled workers on the manufacturing floor that have the training and capabilities to meet this specialized demand. Therefore, if he sought out the lower cost manufacturing of barrels for commodities, he would in essence waste money, as his employees would not be focused on where their expertise lays.

“The volume we’ve acquired is to keep the factory busy,” he says, “and we are pretty good at finding these specialized products that are challenging to hold because they require a more complex, higher quality of drum.”

Trilla also takes pride in the company’s use of innovative technologies.

“We were the first company to test the full surface of both open-head and tight-head drums for leaks, which has now become very common in our industry,” Trilla says.

His company also pioneered high-speed drum welding, vertical flanging and swedging systems, vertical corrugation and vertical drum expansion. The company has also recently installed vertical high-speed lining systems and exterior painting systems.

Further, Trilla’s custom exterior coatings are tested for quality, viscosity, resistance to heat and abrasion, color stability, impact, and corrosion resistance. The linings meet standards for uniformity of application, lack of hardness, color, flexibility, and resistance to acids, alkalis and organic chemicals.

Built into the manufacturing process is a high degree of flexibility that enables customers to quickly source quality, high-speed, and affordable drums for a number of applications.

Despite all of these advancements, growth within the industry is something of a challenge.

“There’s not really a tremendous amount of growth that can be had in the product due to the consolidation of the chemical companies that use our product and because of competition from manufacturers in China,” says Trilla. “The only way we see growth is to become a bigger fish in a smaller pond. To do that, we want to acquire competitors in this market.”

Trilla says there is only one truly national barrel maker in the U.S. However, there are a handful of smaller, regional barrel makers.

“I would like to see us become a national company,” he says. “There are a number of smaller companies out there where the owners are either looking to retire or don’t want to weather the storm, so that provides us with an opportunity to move into these areas.

“There are maybe 15 complete barrel makers left in the U.S.,” Trilla says. “The nucleus of the barrel industry is probably down to about 11 or 12 people.”