Kruger Products, known for its Purex and Scotties tissue brands, began as Westminster Paper Mills Ltd. in 1922.

Remember when there wasn’t a square to spare?

Toilet paper flew off the shelves early in the COVID-19 pandemic and stores began rationing their sale, limiting customers to one or two packages per purchase.

Yet the only plant in Western Canada that makes toilet paper, Kruger Products in New Westminster, was going full-bore the whole time, continuing to roll-out TP at maximum speed.

“These machines are already running full-out, they’re very capital intensive so you need to run them continuously and because you’ve got to run them continuously there’s very little opportunity to meet surging demand,” Dino Bianco, Kruger’s CEO, said. “When you make toilet paper, you know what the demand is going to be. People use it regularly, it’s not like ice cream or alcohol that people use discretionally.”

Until a pandemic arrives, anyway.

The New West pulp mill celebrated its 100th anniversary last week, its 370 employees and hundreds of family members touring the facilities and milling about, many of them multi-generational Kruger families, such as Ryan Peterson, a machine-tender whose father Ernie retired after 41 years as a maintenance mechanic.

Volunteers, mostly retirees who had left eons ago after decades of working for the company, talked about the family atmosphere and the lifelong friends they had made.

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Indeed, the Montreal-based family that created the company and that owns about 80 per cent of the firm is run by a third-generation Kruger, with a fourth generation learning the ropes and a fifth generation on the way.

When the pulp slurry — about 99.9 per cent water to begin with — is gently heated and rolled, it comes out as two 92-inch-wide rolls, 84 inches in diameter. They weigh 3,500 pounds each – part of the 130 to 150 tons produced every day – and look for all the world like the toilet paper you would need if you lived atop a giant beanstalk in a castle in the clouds.

Watching a gargantuan roll being put into place for the drying process by state-of-the-art electronics housed inside a 1980s control box and panel is like being on the set of an old science fiction TV show, albeit one where paper moves at 55 m.p.h and all the water being extracted is collected for reuse.

Once the tissue paper is dried and rolled, robots and production lines are in constant motion packaging them for shipment, an almost jarring mix of heavy industrial sounds and sights in the digital age.

A biomass gasification system, the first of its kind in Canada, the company says, and the first in the pulp-and-paper industry worldwide, was installed in 2009. It heats locally sourced wood waste into syngas and cuts greenhouse-gas emissions in half — the equivalent of removing 5,500 fossil-fuel cars from the road or planting three million trees.

The mill began operations in 1922 as Westminster Paper Mills (“Paper napkins that gleam like fine linen!”).

Despite the hundreds-of-millions of dollars invested over the years, there is a discernible old-time feel to the plant and its grounds, from the buildings — which include the U.S.S.R. pavilion from Expo 86 for pulp storage, and the oldest building on site, built in 1930 after a fire in 1929 levelled the original mill — to the train tracks that bisect the site next to the log booms nestling on the shore of Poplar Island on the adjacent Fraser River.

Interestingly, while demand for toilet paper surged during spikes in COVID, demand fell for the company’s Scotties facial tissue.

“We didn’t have flu season,” Bianco said. “People weren’t going out, they weren’t sick if they didn’t have COVID, allergy season was diminished … facial tissues actually saw a slight dip in demand before coming back to normal now.”

A lot of people still refer to the mill as Scott Paper, but Kruger has owned it since 1997 (although the signage wasn’t changed until 2007).

Its Purex toilet paper is ubiquitous on store shelves — but only in Western Canada. Out East, customers grew up with Cashmere and that’s the brand of choice in Ontario and Quebec when customers buy Kruger product for the reading room.

And, especially if you’re a fan of the hack and the hog line, Scotties has a long history of sponsoring the Tournament of Hearts, the national women’s curling championship. (The 2023 Scotties will be held in Kamloops, where Kruger just bought the former Domtar pulp mill.)

That the New West mill is still going and growing after a century shows a commitment to the long-term, said Bianco, who became CEO in 2018 after a long career at Kraft.

“We don’t worry about Wall Street, that’s allowed us to make big investments … it’s almost a family way of looking at our network.”

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