Cumberland Invests (CONT’D FROM PAGE 1)
was getting old and there was a lot of new equipment on the market.” Another factor played into the decision, Jared said. “In 2015, after almost 45 years of debt, we finally paid off the banks. And so, we had some money that we didn’t have to use to pay down debt.”
you’re going to be competitive, you have to buy fast set- up, fast running, and good registration machinery.” I Parachuted In…’ A relative newcomer to the corrugated box business, Jared bought Cumberland Container in 2010 from his fa- ther who founded the company in Monterey, Tennessee, in 1968. At the time, Jared recalled, he was living in Shang- hai, China, already 25 years into a successful overseas real estate development career. “I got a fax from my dad while still working in China for Dubai World, and he said, ‘You need to come home and buy the company.’ I bought the box plant, but I returned to China.” Jared explained that his father, an attorney, had original- ly acquired the company as an investment and had a sea- soned general manager running it. His hand-off approach, he reasoned, would also work for Mark. It didn’t. “Within about two years, we loaded up the family and moved to middle Tennessee. I parachuted into the box business, not knowing a thing about how to make a box.” Jared’s admitted lack of knowledge about the success- ful operation of a small independent sheet plant was the genesis of his success today. Arriving back in Tennessee in 2013, he relied on the company’s long-time general man- ager to run the day-to-day – until, in 2015, the GM abruptly left the company, taking with him $3 million in business. “That was a big shock,” Jared recalled in his 2024 AICC podcast, ‘Corrugated Candy Store.’ [now.aiccnow.org/cor- rugated-candy-store/] “That’s when we scrambled and, on my dad’s recommendation, we set up a management team.” A Winning Team The Cumberland Container management team is made up of Jared, plus five senior managers in the company: Plant Manager Thomas Barker; Sales Manager Randy Swal- lows; Operations Manager Andrew Miller; Chief Financial Officer Tim Dunn; and Design Manager Scott Watson. All told, this box-business brain trust brings a collective 100+ years’ experience to guide the company’s day-to-day op- erations, strategic direction and the capital investments to support them. Thomas Barker is a 34-year veteran on the industry, having spent the last seven years as President of Jackson Paper’s Sustainable Corrugated division. Randy Swallows has been with Cumberland Container for over 40 years, while Andrew Miller made his start at the compa- ny 21 years ago on the plant floor. Tim Dunn is also a 20+ year veteran, and Scott Watson, 30 years and counting, began as a machine operator before being promoted to design and estimating. Cumberland Container’s successive investments of the past eight years came about as much by mechanical need as they did financial happenstance. “At the time [2015] we had all used equipment except for a couple pieces,” Jared recalled. “The only new equipment my father had bought was the [Bobst] mini-Martin flexo folder gluer in 2005 and a Bobst Expert Fold specialty gluer in 2011. Everything else
Capital Investment Begins The company’s location in Monterey places it in the Upper Cumberland geographic region. According to the Cumberland Plateau Planning District Commission, the top manufacturing sectors in the Upper Cumberland include automotive, vulcanized materials, wood products, plastics, furniture, heavy machinery and automotive. This makes Cumberland Container primarily an industrial, brown- box company in a very competitive area, and Jared and his team thus focused first on augmenting their existing equipment to meet customers’ growing needs in these in- dustries. Two successive acquisitions in 2017 and 2018 – a BCS AutoBox and Baysek C170 HD flatbed die cutter -- met that goal. “We had to figure out how to run our old machinery more efficiently and to cut out some of the short runs,” Jared said. That’s why we targeted the BCS AutoBox It al- lowed us to spend more time on the other machines that took 20 to 30 minutes to set up so that we could run them more efficiently,” Jared said. The Baysek C170 55-inch by 67-inch flatbed die-cutter, for its part, was the 2018 installation. “In 2016 I went to my first SuperCorrExpo and that’s where we saw the Baysek,” Jared said. “We didn’t have any kind of flatbed die cutter and we felt like there would be some application in our mix,” adding that, as with most machines, it took some time to realize its potential. “The first year we just ran it two or three days a week,” he said, “but it wasn’t long before we were running it five days a week and then five days, two shifts.” The Baysek had the effect of jump-stating the compa- ny’s partition business, so much so that in a few years later – in January 2021 – Cumberland Container installed a Pre- mier Converting Machinery Model 221C Jumbo Auto-Feed Cumberland ’ s Bobst Expert Fold specialty gluer was an earlier upgrade to the company's equipment roster, arriving in 2011. From left are crew members Jacob Hargis, operator; Dustin Hernandez; and Elijah Phillips with Mark Jared.
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September 15, 2025
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