This founder is using a heritage industry to tackle a modern problem

With her company, Tanbark, Melissa LaCasse is leveraging Maine’s legacy industry of pulp and paper to take aim at the modern problem of single-use plastic waste. Based in the city of Saco—long a center of lumber manufacturing—Tanbark designs and fabricates elegant packaging using molded fiber, a biodegradable wood-based material sourced from Maine timber.

“We’re trying to be very circular,” says LaCasse. “We’re extracting resources from our local economy. We’re utilizing them, and when we’re done, they go back to the earth in a non-toxic manner.”

Tanbark earned LaCasse recognition in this year’s Northeastern University Women Who Empower Innovator Awards, which honor entrepreneurs for their innovative, boundary-pushing work. The 2024 award recipients were selected by a panel of judges and will receive a total of $500,000 in funding. For her part, LaCasse garnered first place in the category Powering a Sustainable, Resilient World.

LaCasse is a 2022 graduate of Northeastern’s Roux Institute Founder Residency Program, a startup incubator of sorts designed to support Maine companies run by women, people of color, LGBTQ+, and other historically marginalized people.

Since completing the program, LaCasse has been busy in her mission to help companies reduce their reliance on single-use plastic. Tanbark is on a steady growth track, with two production lines up and running and six more planned for 2025. Its customer base comprises well-known brands such as Luke’s Lobster, a family-owned Maine seafood business with lobster shacks worldwide.

LaCasse was in part inspired to start Tanbark after listening to a podcast episode of “On Being” hosted by Krista Tippett. Tippett’s guest on the show was Robert McFarland, an environmental writer. During the episode, Tippett posed the question, “What kind of ancestor do you want to be?”

The question struck a chord with LaCasse.

“Pondering the impact of our actions on future generations, who may never know us, resonated deeply within me,” says LaCasse. Motivated by a desire to transform her climate concerns into tangible action, she felt compelled to make a difference.

LaCasse tapped a trusted expert in molded fiber packaging—her husband, Christopher. The family already had a business called LaCasse and Weston that engineers high-precision equipment for the molded fiber industry.

“Christopher came up with this idea of a machine that was innovative for a lot of reasons. It’s a very open platform, and we can do a lot with it,” LaCasse says. “While we could sell this machine to somebody who was in thermoform plastics, it’s difficult to plug in one of these machines and just run it. So, we decided to start Tanbark so we could give access to the market to different types of companies.”

LaCasse credits the Roux Institute with helping Tanbark accelerate to new heights. Within the first four months of her joining the Founder Residency, the company secured about $1.8 million in seed funding. It has since garnered another $1.5 million, bringing its total amount raised to more than $3 million so far.

“Tanbark has a lot of Roux support in the DNA of our successes and ability to recalibrate after stumbles,” says LaCasse. “I want to pay that forward, and also engage and learn from others in the community.”

LaCasse joined the Founder Residency program in September 2021, just months after she founded Tanbark. She heard about the program after asking representatives from the Maine Venture Fund for advice on how to raise funding.

She spent her first few months in the year-long program attending class each day, meeting with mentors, and absorbing everything the program had to offer. As she progressed through her residency, LaCasse gained a deeper understanding of the Roux Institute’s network of contacts and the best ways to take advantage of its resources.

“Melissa and her team are incredible experts in the packaging business and the core business of what they were doing,” says Chris Wolfel, associate vice president and head of entrepreneurship and venture creation at the Roux Institute. “I believe what we added was how to build and scale a high-growth company while staying in Maine.”

Now that Tanbark is manufacturing product, it’s looking to the future. LaCasse says the company will pursue a Series A funding round, hire additional staff, and explore expanding its production facilities to rural Maine near the pulp supply, infrastructure, and labor force of the legacy mill sites.

“From there, I don’t know,” says LaCasse, “but we’re having a lot of fun.”