Kimberly-Clark’s Chester mill produces 60% of Scott 1000 in the USA

Kimberly-Clark is an American multinational personal care company that primarily produces paper-based consumer products. Over its nearly 150-year history, the company has well-known brands with products that best meet consumer needs, such as Kleenex®, Scott®, Huggies® and Kotex®.

At its plant in Chester, Pennsylvania, the company produces Scott brand rolls, specifically the Scott 1000 line. In normal times, before the pandemic, the Chester mill produced two million rolls of Scott 1000 a day, over 700 million for year. This corresponds to 60% of this line produced in the United States. The company is the national leader in the sale of toilet paper.

This mill was founded by brothers E. Irvin and Clarence Scott, the founders of the Scott Paper Company in 1890. They pioneered the concept of creating toilet paper rolls, which were once sold in tissue piles, as napkins are sold today. The transformation to toilet paper rolls, which were previously sold in drugstores, was due to the increase in hygiene care after the creation of the internal plumbing of the houses.

Kevin Bigelow, Senior Manager of Product Systems at the plant, says that toilet paper is a product you don’t think about until you have it. “But with the pandemic that changed. We always thought it was the most important thing and now everyone agrees on that,” he declared. For Robert Barkhau, Senior Engineering Manager, the pandemic has placed the product in an essential category, due to the lack of supplies that occurred with panic buying in the country.