BRISTOL, Ind. – When RVBusiness last spoke to the management team at Supersede in July of this year, the company was planning a new expansion in Elkhart County to serve its new commitment to the RV industry (see: “Coachmen Catalina Adds Marine Board Decking from Supersede“). It had just signed an agreement with the Forest River division, Coachmen Industries, to supply Supersede Marine Board Composite Decking into the floor structure of Catalina trailers.
Today the company is now producing product from its new 100,000 square-foot manufacturing plant in Bristol, Ind.
Sean Petterson, co-founder of the firm, shared the news of the new manufacturing facility dedicated to the RV and Marine business cluster of the greater Elkhart area. This is an expansion from its original production facility in Phoenix, Ariz.
“That is really what our presence in Elkhart is all about,” said Petterson. “It’s 100,000 square feet. It’s located in Bristol, right in the heart of everything. We’re fortunate to get some support from local municipalities on some incentives. We’ll be employing in the first phase 65 people. We’ve been working on it for a couple of months. So we’re announcing that we’re actually shipping product out of there soon.”
Supersede engineered building materials can be used for RV, specialty vehicles, modular housing, and some commercial and residential construction. Its flagship product, the Supersede Marine Board, is a modern, scalable replacement for marine-grade plywood and composites. The new facility has some impressive production goals.
“We’re going to have about 40 million square feet of production capacity, per year,” he stated explaining how production of sheeting is designed to dovetail with OEM needs.
“That is actually one of the beauties of what we do as a company,” said Petterson. “With automation we will be producing off highly efficient and flexible production lines. So we’ll have automation on quality control to be able to rapidly adapt for customer orders. We’ve also patented a couple of interesting things. So for example, tongue and groove product. We’re doing a board for slide outs as well. It’s zero waste, but also creates a really tough product because it’s formed in the extrusion process.”
He said at this point it is producing its flooring products in four-foot widths.
“But effectively custom work is what’s enabled by the line,” Petterson explained. “Because we extrude it, we can do this at any length. So it really just depends on the desires of the build. And so we have robotic systems that will cut the boards as they come off the line to spec. As far as thickness, in this facility, by request of our customers, we’ll be doing three eighths and adding one inch to thicknesses to the production, as well as continuing our half inch, five eighths and three-quarter inch production.”
He said he is grateful to the Forest River Group that had the vision to adopt its products and helped to pave the way for industry wide RV production.
“Specifically Mike Gaeddert’s vision to see the whole industry succeed,” shared Petterson. “I think he’s been a pioneer in this space. Giving us a shot as a new company in the RV realm and working with his team on engineering. So we’ve got best practices to continue to bring on and elevate across the industry.
“Now we’re going to have a large CNC capacity as well, which is great for some kitted parts. That CNC machine literally just got delivered yesterday. So once that’s tuned in, we’ve got a lot of demand. We want people to come by and see how the sausage is made.”
The extrusion line works producing 100% recyclable material so cutouts on any flooring panels are reused.
“With our off-cut buyback program we’ll actually buy back all of the scrap, grind it up and turn it into new boards for our customers,” he concluded. “We’re trying to take a fully circular approach here to our manufacturing process and bring zero waste into our initiatives.
