Keith Hemmig

Keith Hemmig came to packaging through design, with a BFA from Miami University and an early career building art for a Nestlé campaign, and that foundation never left him. It’s why, nearly three decades later, he can walk into a brand-team meeting and speak fluently with the designer, the package engineer, and the procurement director, often in the same breath.

Before joining ILLING in 2015, Keith spent 12 years on the manufacturing side at Ropak and BWAY Corporation, managing accounts exceeding $75MM across steel, aerosol, and plastics for companies like ConAgra, Nestle Purina, MAPEI, and Turtle Wax. That experience, knowing how a pressroom and production floor actually think, is what separates his solutions from a catalog recommendation. He’s not proposing options. He’s engineering answers.

At ILLING, he built the company’s brand, digital presence, and content engine largely from scratch, and has brought home 11 NACD Packaging Awards across six categories, plus an Ameristar Award for a source-reduced ConAgra package that cut resin by 30% and grew annual sales by 20%. Today he’s leading ILLING’s full-stack digital integration: ERP, CRM, PIM/DAM, and an eCommerce site built for LLM and browser ranking.

He lives in Racine with his wife Karri and their three children, serves as Chair of the City of Racine Parks and Recreation Board, and is working on a memoir about his extensive music collection, less a catalog and more a connection of stories.

Relationships and phone calls still run this business, and that is not changing. What ILLING is building is a fully integrated system, ERP, CRM, PIM/DAM, and an eCommerce site architected for LLM and browser ranking, so that when a buyer is searching for rigid packaging expertise at 10pm on a Tuesday, ILLING shows up with the right answer instead of a competitor’s ad.

The goal is not to replace the conversation. It is to make sure ILLING is the one having it. And because Keith reads a job from the substrate up, ILLING works best when it is brought in at the beginning of a project, before a screen-built art file becomes a delay, a reprint, or a tense phone call, not at the end.

Keith coordinates, submits, and personally accepts ILLING’s NACD Packaging Awards. Under his hand the company has won across six categories in six consecutive years:

Earlier, on the manufacturing side, Keith earned an Ameristar Packaging Award (2008–09) for a source-reduced David’s Seeds club-store package at Ropak / ConAgra: it cut resin consumption 30%, reduced GHG emissions 26%, lifted cube utilization 30%, and drove a 20% increase in annual sales. Ameristar is one of the packaging industry’s most prestigious design competitions.