Stretch goals: Surging home deliveries and more sustainable wraps accelerates the Carter family's Atlantic Packaging.

• Author: MacMillan, Mike

Not everyone was blindsided when inflation shot up this summer to its highest level in 40 years. Rusty and Wes Carter, the father-and-son team who lead Wilmington-based Atlantic Packaging, saw it coming a mile away.

"We saw [inflation] coming a year and a half ago and coming in double digits," says Rusty, who is CEO. "Especially in paper, in lumber, in resin. And it has not slowed down a bit. Demand has been outrunning capacity."

Atlantic, which celebrated its 75th anniversary last year, is weathering the storm. It's closing in on $1 billion in annual revenue and is in the midst of its largest capital investment in two decades: the construction of a $40 million facility to manufacture air filter frames in Dallas. The pandemic era has sent filter demand soaring, with Atlantic's sales of the paper framing expanding at a 30% annual clip compared with about 5% previously.

"COVID put a lot of focus on clean air," Rusty says.

With about 2,000 employees, including about 1,000 in North Carolina, Atlantic makes a lot of essential products that are rarely top of mind for the average consumer. In addition to air filter frames, Atlantic's 10 plants churn out liners for packaged food products and the stretch wrap used for things shipped on pallets.

The company traces its origins to Rusty's father, newspaperman Horace Carter, who started the Tabor City Tribune in Columbus County in 1946. Seven years later, the paper became the first weekly to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, U.S. journalism's highest honor, for its multiyear campaign to expose the Ku Klux Klan. Tabor City is a town of 4,000 that is 70 miles from Wilmington and 45 miles from Myrtle Beach.

Horace Carter parlayed his publishing expertise into related businesses printing booklets, menus and other materials for the emerging Grand Strand. When his son, Rusty, joined the business in 1971, it moved more aggressively beyond printing, adding warehouses and paper distribution and acquiring companies in related businesses and new geographies. Atlantic now ranks as the nation's biggest independently owned packaging company, family members say.

Rusty and Wes followed Horace to UNC Chapel Hill, with each earning journalism degrees. So did Wes' younger brother, Scott. Leigh, Rusty's oldest daughter, also is a UNC graduate, while younger daughter, Ellen, earned a bachelor's at the University of Denver. Leigh is the only sibling not active in the business.

The packaging industry is huge, but not especially...