As we celebrate our 40th anniversary and look back at some of the products that we've produced over the years, consider the flexible funnel. This ubiquitous fuel and oil funnel can be found in garages all over the world and everyone who has ever owned a vehicle is familiar with them. The roots of the funnel can be traced back to Confer Plastics, Inc.
The funnel was designed by a then 23-year-old Doug Confer in the mid-1970s, an idea that was formulated while working on the family farm and seeing a need for an inexpensive and more useful funnel than the rigid, expensive metal funnels that were on the market at the time.
Confer Plastics made hundreds of thousands of these in the 70s and early 80s before the company got out of the funnel market due to the patent having come to an end and the item becoming a commodity made in volume on the cheap overseas by our competitors.
