The story
The company was established as Thermo Fibrotek in 1991 as a wholly owned subsidiary of Thermo Electron as part of its parent's strategy to innovate and grow by creating subsidiaries that were privately owned in part, and publicly traded in part. Its initial focus was paper making and paper recycling equipment.
In 1996, the company set up a subsidiary, Thermo Fibergen, which it in turn made partially publicly traded, to focus on technologies to recover products from paper-making waste products; that company in turn acquired Granulation Technology, Inc. and created a division called GranTek that produced granules from sludge that were used, for example, as a carrier for agricultural chemicals and pesticides. The original plan was that Fibergen would build its plants adjacent to paper-making plants to process their waste, but this plan failed because it required paper-making plants to commit to long-term contracts to dispose of their waste, which they were unwilling to do. The granule business became the focus of Fibergen, helped in part by enzymologist Anatole Klyosov.
In 1997, the company acquired Black Clawson for $110 million.
In 2001, Thermo Electron fully spun out Thermo Fibrotek, which changed its name to Kadant at the same time; the Fibrogen division was renamed to Kadant Composites at the same time. The granule business of Kadant Composites took off when the company started using it as a filler in composite plastics products for decking, with sales growing from under $2 million in 2001 to $15 million in 2004.
In 2013, the company acquired Carmanah Design and Manufacturing Inc. for Canadian dollars (CAD) 54 million in cash, or approximately US$52 million.
From Wikipedia’s article on Kadant, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.9