UC’s Tennessee Custom Mixing Ready To Spread Its Wings

UNION CITY, Tenn.—Tennessee Custom Mixing (TCM), an independent subsidiary of Titan International Inc., is ready to spread its wings—as well as its rubber compounds—in 2026.

In 2011, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. closed in Union City, and Obion County immediately lost 2,000 direct jobs and an estimated 4,000 indirect jobs.  Lindsay Theobald, CEO of Obion County Economic Development, said, “They were our largest employer in the Northwest TN and Southwest KY region.”

Titan Tire then purchased the 2.1 million square foot building and put people back to work.  “While they do not employ as many as Goodyear did, they are an excellent addition to our business community.  We are proud to have them in Obion County,” she said.

Titan Tire is so successful now that ‘Rubber News’ featured it in its latest edition.

TCM today serves the rubber roller, automotive, tires/treads, mining, conveyor belt, wire and hose spaces, among many other markets.  They are buying a lot of SBR, natural rubber, and classic masterbatch-type materials,  working in EPDM, BR, HNBR and chloroprene, among many other rubbers. They have a new research and development lab currently under construction.

Theobald said, “I am excited at the work they are doing now, especially the expansion into serving other rubber businesses.”

These are excerpts from the article:

“The central U.S. firm has been growing its external business model since 2021, when the pandemic forced market

contractions and TCM jumped at the opportunity to fill mixing roles for customers outside of Titan.

“Where we position ourselves is that we are big enough to play with all the big names,” Aaron Wells, director of
compound development at TCM, told Rubber News. “That is one of the attractive pieces to us—pursuing that outside
market, as we were focused in the past on the internal piece.

“As COVID happened, market contractions happened—and we saw an opportunity to grow that piece out. In my mind,
we are well-suited as a single facility to compete with any other single facility in the U.S.”

Housed in a 2.1-million-sq.-ft. former Goodyear tire
production facility (and still on Goodyear Road), TCM
occupies about 600,000 square feet of that building
for its operations.

Since 2014, several years after Titan acquired the
Union City facility from Goodyear for $9 million, the
custom mixing firm with capacity for 2 million pounds

per day has compounded rubber for Titan’s off-the-
road and agricultural tires.

“Titan owns the building, TCM supplies all the
compounds to all four (Titan) tire plants for Titan Tire
Corp. of America,” Aaron Scott, general manager of the
TCM facility, told Rubber News. “With our outside
model, we supply compound for on-the-road tires and
into the construction sector.

“There is nothing black and round in the industry that
we do not supply compound for, whether on-road or
off-road.”

With 10 mixing lines as well as three calendering lines
(fabric, wire and gum), TCM today serves the rubber
roller, automotive, tires/treads, mining, conveyor belt,
wire and hose spaces, among many other markets.”