Junction Triangle

Colt Paper has been making custom cardboard boxes at 151 Sterling Rd since 1962, when Sydney Colt bought the building. But he was in the box business in the Triangle Junction thirty years before that. .. Colt started back in 1935 when Sydney realized the manufacturing concerns all along the railroad tracks in Toronto's industrial sector were always critically short of boxes. He began buying and selling used containers of all descriptions, and doing business under the name S. Colt & Sons throughout the west Toronto area.

For many years S Colt and Sons bought and sold cardboard boxes in and around the Junction; their customers were store merchants and industrialists all over the city. In the 1950’s, S. Colt & Sons started ordering new boxes direct from Canadian cardboard manufacturers and the company grew to include more full time employees.

By the 1960’s, Colt Carton Service had become a manufacturer of corrugated boxes.

Who invented the cardboard box?
In the 1961 Colt Paper started manufacturing cardboard boxes in Toronto and followed a process that was pioneered almost one hundred years earlier in England called called 'pleating paper'to make stuff used as a liner for fancy hats. The corrugated box board was patented ten years later on December 20, 1871. The patent was issued to Albert Jones of New York City for single-sided (single-face) corrugated board.

This is Sterling Rd looking north from Dundas St in the early 1920s. This is the industrial park beside the railroad tracks. Colt Paper set up their factory here in the 1960s and they have been making and selling custom cardboard boxes ever since.

In the mid-1950s, cardboard fruit boxes took off in America because they enabled fresh produce to be brought from the farm to the urban grocer without bruising, and quickly thereafter the demand for cardboard became industry - wide, and Colt Paper was in the thick of it!

In the 1970s and 80s, Sidney’s son Neil helped expand the company to include various products for shipping including bubble wrap, custom cardboard tubes with crimped ends or plugs, poly bags, packing peanuts, custom wooden crates, poly foam.

The area has changed from industrial park to an artsy entrepreneurial zone, but Colt Paper can still be found at 151 Sterling Rd. Toronto Ontario Canada M6R 2B2. Tel: 416 - 535 - 7234 or call toll free, 1- 800 - 249 - 2658