Hoffmaster Group

Hoffmaster was founded in February 1947 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin by B. T. Hoffmaster with four employees, a single napkin-printing machine, and the second floor of a warehouse — set up specifically to manufacture printed paper napkin products for the American restaurant trade. Through the 1950s the firm built the printed ensemble that became its identity: matched placemats, dinner and cocktail napkins, and decorator-colour tablecovers sold as a coordinated set to restaurants. Ownership has changed several times since — Amstar merger 1970, Scott Paper 1985, Solo Cup 2004, Kohlberg & Company from 2007 — but the manufacturing footprint has remained in Wisconsin and the product identity has remained continuous. Today Hoffmaster Group is the principal American manufacturer of decorative disposable tabletop products for foodservice and retail.

The firm designs, prints, and converts a broad range of paper-based tabletop products: printed and embossed napkins across every size class, placemats, tablecovers, coasters, guest towels, and the retail-branded decorative-napkin lines carried in American grocery and party-goods stores. Product design work is done in-house, giving the firm control over the seasonal, holiday, and licensed-property patterns that drive category demand at retail. In 2019 the group acquired Paterson Pacific Parchment Company, adding its California-manufactured pan-liner and baker’s-parchment lines to the Hoffmaster foodservice portfolio. Manufacturing is distributed across several US facilities, with the corporate operation continuing to run from Oshkosh.

What distinguishes Hoffmaster in its category is the vertical range from design to manufacture. Most decorative-tabletop suppliers to American foodservice and retail either design and outsource print, or print and licence pattern from outside — a two-firm supply chain that separates the sensory expression of the product from the machinery that makes it. Hoffmaster runs both under one roof, with in-house pattern and design studios feeding the same printing and converting lines that produce the product, and does so across a family of brands (Hoffmaster, FashnPoint, Paterson Pacific Parchment, and its retail-consumer labels) that give the firm reach into both the away-from-home foodservice trade and the American grocery and party-goods shelf.