The Chein company pioneered the process of product licensing in the 1920s and 1930s, purchasing the art and rights for comic character toys featuring Popeye, Felix, then later the Disney characters, and eventually the Ninja Turtles and company advertising logos, such as Coca Cola.
Still, the company was working with a material that was rapidly becoming obsolete. Plastic was quickly taking over metal fabrication in both the toy and housewares divisions. Steel was too expensive, plastic was the new base material and the wave of the future. Rejecting plastics, refusing to involve their products in television advertising, and not selling to the mass merchandisers and discount stores, the company could not survive much longer. They did try to move into plastics, but it never quite worked for them.
Then in the mid-60s, Samuel Hoffman retired from Chein. Shortly afterwards the U.S. government hurried the end of the production of tin toys because of the hazards of their sharp edges. The cost of retooling to curl the edges of the toys was cost prohibitive, and thus ended the Chein era of tin toys.
The Chein toy division expanded its marketing and development, acquiring the Learning Aids Group, including it's Renwal Plastic Division. Although they made toy planes, boats and cars, what most of us remember most from this company is the Visible Man and the Visible Woman.
In downsizing efforts a few years later, Renwal was sold and the toy division of Chein was discontinued. The company turned all of its attention to housewares in 1976, which they had been producing since the mid-fifties. Their products included kitchen canisters, bread boxes and one of their most successful items -- wastebaskets. It is in this time period that their advertising tins started being manufactured. Many of the Cheinco tins were given away empty when the products were purchased, sitting next to the actual products or on special displays in the grocery stores. There were also sets of tins, e.g. Sunkist California Dream Tin, Heinz Pearl Onions, and Maxwell House Coffee that were sold in department stores, packaged as a cannister set.
In the 1980's Cheinco Industries, produced a series of lithographed steel "carry-all" tins including Donald Duck, Star Wars and Oreos. Throwbacks to the two-handled pails of the 1920's and 1930's, these tins ins were too small to carry an entire lunch, but nonetheless turned up in lunch box collections. It was also around this time, that Bristol Ware, a division of Cheinco, reproduced the very popular roly poly Tobacco Tins. (Note: not sure when the Bristol Ware Division started, came into being or how production was broken down).
The company continued with the housewares until the late 1980's, when the company was sold to the Atlantic Can Company and was then known as the Atlantic Cheinco Corp. The Atlantic Can Company produced cake and cookie tins, but was beset by problems including chemical odors being released from the plant and the fact that they were, according to bankruptcy proceedings "a seasonal cowpony trying to go counter-seasonal". The company, one of the world's leaving manufacturers of metal lithographed containers, including cookie tins, kitchen canisters, and wastebaskets filed for bankruptcy in February 1992, two years after one of their biggest successes, 700,000 Ninja Turtle wastebaskets were sold! Later that year Ellisco Inc., a Pennsylvania company, purchased the assets of Cheinco
