Ice Cream Sandwich Wrap
Location 19
Date: 1958
Owner: Linette M. Heinlin, Daughter of Paul J. and Isabelle Heinlin
Toledo is known for its manufacturing, especially glass, scales, and the Jeep. Perhaps not as well-known, yet far-reaching, was Heinlin Packaging Service, Inc., which was a Toledo firm owned by Paul J. and Isabelle Heinlin. The south Toledo Company, which the Heinlins founded in 1958, developed and built machinery to package numerous products from ice cream to pencils. Mr. Heinlin was instrumental in the development of the first ice cream sandwich machine. It made the product and wrapped it. He also designed and developed a machine that wrapped the original Klondike bar. Mrs. Heinlin was the office manager who was in charge of all bookkeeping, receptionist, and secretarial duties for the business. Prior to the founding of the company, Mr. Heinlin was employed at Lynch Machinery in Toledo as a service engineer and model designer. In 1958, he bought five lines of machinery from Lynch, which helped him launch his own firm. In addition to pencils and ice cream novelties, Mr. Heinlin designed and built packaging machines that wrapped a variety of products like butter, candy bars, caramels, pie, and modeling clay. Mr. Heinlin and his firm has made packaging machines for many businesses such as Kraft Foods, Borden's, Wallace Pencil Co., Boyer Candies, Griffin Pie, Linette Candy Co., Eskimo Pie, and Goetze's Candy Co., to name a few. Being a packaging engineer also required extensive travel, as Mr. Heinlin (and later, his sons) installed and serviced the machines that his company built. As a result, Mr. Heinlin and/or his sons traveled all over the United States, and even abroad to Finland and Luxembourg to install their packaging machines. Heinlin Packaging Service, Inc. was a family business that operated from 1958 to 2020, with most of the five Heinlin children having worked there alongside their parents. Heinlin Packaging Service, Inc. is not only one story unto itself, but a reflection of Toledo as a whole: it is a representation of this city's ingenuity and hard-working citizens.