General Foam Plastics was a blow mold manufacturing company that ran from 1957 to 2017. GFP, often shortened to just General Foam, went on to acquire several defunct blow mold companies throughout its run, most notably Beco Products, Empire Plastics and Poloron Products.
History[]
General Foam was founded in 1957 in Norfolk, VA. They specialized in making blow molded plastic lawn figures, Christmas trees, pools, ponds and planters. They acquired Several defunct blow mold companies throughout their business run, including Empire, Poloron, Santa's Best and Beco.
In the late 2000s, Blow Mold sales began to fall to an all time low as consumers were turning to buy more convenient and easy to put up and store decorations like Airblown inflatables. As the blow mold companies slowly fell one by one, General Foam soon found itself as one of the last major seasonal blow mold companies still alive. It's biggest consumers were Sears and Kmart, Amazon and a multitude of Online Retailers, as well as Garden Ridge (now 'At Home'), however this store was only available at a select number of states at the time and was obscure to the rest of the country.
In August 2017, General Foam's CEO William Arnold announced that it was putting its Norfolk factory up for sale as the company could no longer continue keeping up with low sales combined with battling overseas manufacturing. In January 2018, GFP sold all of its remaining merchandise, and in March, the company officially went defunct and all of its employees were laid off. The Norfolk factory was shut down after 60 plus years of work.
In 2018, Cado Products revealed that they had been present at the GFP auction and purchased several molds. The molds are rumored to be the Nativity Set and Wisemen, Mrs Claus, Dancing Santa, Toy Soldier, and a pallet of different Candle variants. So far, the only produced mold from this collection was the toy Soldier, which was sold at Menards in 2018 and 2019 and on Amazon.
In late 2023, Cado began manufacturing the Empire/GF Holiday Penguin mold that they acquired from the sale and is featured in their catalog starting in 2024.
Website[]
- Note: since GFP is now out of business, their website is defunct. You wont find much from this link.