Known by friends and family as Senior, Peter Cloeren Sr. immigrated to the United States with his wife in the mid-'50s from Germany via Venezuela. His port of entry was Mobile, Alabama, where the family used most of its savings to purchase a car and head to California, understanding not a word of English.

Senior's received his first exposure to the extrusion process and some exciting new materials called plastics at Crown Zellerbach, then one of the largest paper and packaging companies in the U.S. He was later hired at Guardian Packaging Corp.

During his tenure as an engineer at Guardian, Senior designed and built slitters, extrusion coating lines and laminating lines. He was also instrumental in Guardian's expansion efforts, building new grassroots operations for Guardian in Batavia, Illinois; Calcutta, India; and Victoria, Spain.

In the early '70s, Gulf Oil Chemical Company (now Chevron-Phillips) contracted Guardian to supply an extrusion coating line for its technical laboratory in Orange, Texas. This line was advanced for its time and as of 2008, remains in operation and continues to be used by companies around the world for product development. Senior moved to Orange and started his own engineering company, with Gulf as his anchor client.

Early in the relationship, executives at Gulf presented Senior with a wish list for a new coextrusion apparatus. Their vision was a device that could deliver one-, two- or three-layer coextrusions from one, two or three extruders. They wanted the ability to change the layer sequence relatively quickly (without disconnecting the feed pipes) and desired adjustable metering of the converging flow streams.

Senior returned just days later with the concept sketch of the first Cloeren Feedblock. This device incorporated a Selector Plug™ cartridge, the first known means for changing the layer sequence without disassembly. This technology remains the industry standard today.

Peter Cloeren Jr.
Peter Cloeren (Jr.) began his career in the plastics industry in the late 1970s at Packaging Industries in San Leandro, California, and later at Nesmith Plastics in Houston, Texas.

In 1980, Peter joined his father, and together they formed Cloeren Incorporated.

Peter spent his early years at Cloeren as a service and process technician, gaining hands-on process experience in the new field of coextrusion.

By the mid-1980s Peter began to apply his grassroots experience in the coextrusion process to Feedblock design, developing a multi-plane Feedblock for sequential layering of coextrusion structures. The multi-plane Feedblock, too, remains the industry standard. Peter became CEO of Cloeren Incorporated in January, 1990.

Peter observed through the 1980s that the Feedblock performance was directly associated to Die design. He determined that in order to ensure customers the full value of Cloeren's carefully engineered Feedblocks, the Die designs standards had to be rethought to complement the coextrusion process. Under his leadership, the company rapidly established itself as the largest Die manufacturer in the world.

Today, Cloeren is synonymous with coextrusion. The company has been responsible for some of the Industry's most important innovations and standards, including the Selector Plug cartridge, multi-plane Feedblocks and internal deckles. More important, Cloeren upholds the performance standards by which all others are measured.