Three Maine companies featured

GREENE — Packaging Digest highlighted three Maine companies: Hurricane’s — Premium Soup & Chowder of Greene, J.S. McCarthy Printers of Augusta, and Yes! Marketing Group of Yarmouth in its May cover story.

The packaging industry trade magazine’s feature article focused on a partnership among the three companies that enabled Hurricane’s to bring their award-winning soups, chowders and bisques to retail store shelves on a limited budget.

Packaging Digest became interested in the story last spring when Hurricane’s owner Phil Wilbur met senior editor Linda Casey at an industry trade show. Wilbur told Casey about how J.S. McCarthy and Yes! Marketing Group were collaborating to help the small business develop national-brand-quality retail packaging on a very limited budget. Casey told Wilbur she wanted to report his story on the cover of the May issue, and she needed to photograph packaging samples for the cover shot within two weeks.

What Casey didn’t know was that Wilbur’s packaging design was in only early stages of concept development.

To help Wilbur capitalize on the opportunity for national exposure, Y!MG stepped up the design pace and, with prompt feedback from Wilbur and technical guidance from J.S. McCarthy’s Bill Olmstead, they completed the work for three varieties within a week.

Deadline pressure then moved to J.S. McCarthy, which printed packaging mock-ups on a high-end digital press and individually cut the box blanks on a computer-driven cutter. The boxes were hand assembled, soup-filled boil-in-bags were inserted, and the samples — which are virtually indistinguishable from the final production versions — were shipped overnight to the magazine to arrive a day before its deadline.

Hurricane’s produces all-natural, refrigerated soups, chowders and bisques using primarily locally sourced ingredients at their gluten-free soup-making kitchen in Greene. For more information, visit: www.hurricanedeli.com/soup or call: 946-3354.

J.S. McCarthy Printers is a full-service printer and mail-services company that powers its operations exclusively with wind power. They’re located in Augusta. Visit them on the Web at: www.jsmccarthy.com or call 622-6241.

Yes! Marketing Group is a full-service marketing communications and design firm based in Yarmouth. Its Web site is: www.yes-mg.com.