The History of Carpenter
From a local distributor of latex foam to the world’s largest vertically integrated manufacturer of flexible polyurethane foam, comfort materials and specialty polymer products.
Carpenter Co. got its start as a latex foam distributor in 1950 when E. Rhodes Carpenter decided to start his own business. We set up shop in Richmond’s Manchester neighborhood and soon purchased distribution warehouses in High Point and Hickory, North Carolina. By 1956, we were manufacturing our own flexible urethane foam.
Our Richmond plant was relocated to its current location on Richmond Highway in 1961. It wasn’t long before we began operating the first continuous foam pouring line in Virginia.
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In the late 1960s, we expanded west for the first time, opening plants in Temple, Texas, and Russellville, Kentucky.
We established Choate Chemical Company in 1972 in Pasadena, Texas, as a source of raw materials for our foam producing facilities. The following year, our Roger W. Powell Plant, named after the man who developed Carpenter’s chemical processes and oversaw the construction of the facility, began manufacturing polyether polyols. The Powell Plant today is home to seven reactors that manufacture polyether and polyester polyols.
As demand for our foam grew through the late ’70s and early ’80s, so did Carpenter. We began making bonded carpet cushion, and production facilities were opened in Conover, North Carolina; Tupelo, Mississippi; Riverside, California; Elkhart, Indiana; and Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
We established our corporate headquarters on Monument Avenue in Richmond in 1984, and our state-of-the-art research and development facility was opened next to the Richmond plant in 1989. The Reinhart Technical Center (RTC) is named after Bud Reinhart, who set up Carpenter’s continuous foam pouring operations and developed our groundbreaking Richlux(R) foam in the 1960s. The numerous accomplishments that have taken place at RTC have made our name synonymous with innovation and quality.
When Unit P-6, a reactor used for large-scale polyether polyol manufacturing, was built at our Roger W. Powell Plant in 2003, it was the largest reactor of its kind in the world.
In the early 1990s, we expanded into Europe with the acquisition of Hyman PLC foam manufacturing plants in the United Kingdom and France, and we constructed a new facility in Germany in 1993. Our U.S. Tire Fill Division transitioned to producing and selling products for our own customers.
In the early 2000s, our European presence grew with the acquisition of Cirrus AB in Sweden and Denmark, and Dumo N.V. in Belgium, while domestic foam production sites opened in Lakeland, Florida, and Fogelsville, Pennsylvania.
The 2010s were a period of internal growth for Carpenter, as several of our production plants were expanded to meet larger sales capacities.
With the acquisition of Recticel N.V.’s Engineered Foams Division in June 2023, Carpenter Co. has become the world’s largest manufacturer of flexible foam. The acquisition added more production facilities in Europe and the United States, and brought our business into Africa and Asia for the first time.