A food can has a modest social life. It sits in a cupboard, keeps its contents to itself and rarely receives a compliment. R. Philip Silver helped build a business around the proposition that such an object deserved serious attention. In 1987, he and D. Greg Horrigan founded Silgan. Their starting materials included Nestlé's metal container manufacturing division and Monsanto's plastic container business. The opportunity was already on the shelf.
Silver brought experience in corporate finance, planning and manufacturing management. Horrigan brought his own Continental Can background. Together they built a company whose products would usually be recognized by someone else's label. A consumer might know the soup, the pet food or the sauce. Knowing who made the container was optional. For the founders, the economics behind that container were the main attraction.
There is a second setting for Silver's story, far from a packaging plant. In 2008, he and his wife, Barbara, moved from Connecticut to Portland to be closer to their sons and their growing families. The couple became involved in a new community. Through the Silver Family Foundation, family participation and long commitments would become part of the work. The scale changed. The interest in what an organization could accomplish endured.
A founder with a previous career
Silver did not arrive in packaging as a beginner. Before joining the Continental Group in 1979, he worked in Boise Cascade's paper, packaging and real estate operations. At Continental, his responsibilities included corporate planning and an executive role in its energy subsidiary, Continental Resources. In April 1981, he became executive vice president and chief financial officer of the Continental Group. In June 1983, he became president of Continental Can.
He held that presidency until August 1986. Silgan followed the next year. Those dates give the founding a different texture from the usual tale of an untested entrepreneur. Silver had already worked on both the allocation of money and the running of an industrial company. His next venture brought those disciplines into the same room. The product might be familiar; the arrangement of businesses, customers and capital could still be changed.
Horrigan, a former Continental Can executive vice president and operating officer, was his co-founder. Their partnership placed two experienced packaging executives at the beginning of a new enterprise. Silgan's early purchases also crossed materials: metal food containers on one side, plastic containers on the other. The company began with existing operations and customers, then had to make those businesses work together as an enduring concern.
The arithmetic inside the cupboard
The acquisitions continued. Silgan bought Del Monte's U.S. can manufacturing operations in 1993. American National Can's food metal and specialty business followed in 1995. Campbell Soup's steel container manufacturing business joined in 1998. Each name evokes something from a grocery aisle. Each transaction also describes a less visible change: a food company handing the manufacture of its containers to a specialist.
By 2001, Silgan had acquired 17 businesses. Its share of the U.S. metal food container market had risen from approximately 10 percent in 1987 to approximately 47 percent. That is a considerable amount of cupboard space. Acquisitions and organic growth both contributed. The plastic container and closure business had expanded too, reaching $493.6 million in sales in 2001, more than five times its 1987 level.
Behind those figures lay work less photogenic than a deal announcement: keeping customers supplied, integrating acquired operations and controlling costs. A can maker serves a practical need. The container has to perform its job reliably, in the quantities and at the price its customer requires. Silver's company accumulated businesses in which that ordinary obligation repeated across plants and product lines.
Four rules, including permission to leave
Silver and Horrigan established four principles that Silgan still publishes. They cover meeting customers' particular needs, pursuing a durable competitive advantage, rewarding employees' performance and maintaining ethical standards. The growth principle includes an unusually useful escape clause. Where the company lacks a sustainable advantage, it should refocus, restructure or withdraw. Expansion has a condition attached.
That condition makes the philosophy more interesting than a corporate instruction to grow. It leaves room for judgment about where an organization belongs. The employee principle is equally direct: performance matters because people create the advantage. Equipment, materials and money have to be organized by someone. Read together, the rules place responsibility on management to choose its ground and on the organization to do the work well.
The continuity is visible in the language used years later to describe Silver. When he retired from the board, chairman Tony Allott singled out his focus on shareholder value and his demand for careful reasoning. Allott called it an “insistence on rigor of thought and logic.” That is an unusually precise tribute. It praises the way Silver approached a question, as much as any particular answer.
“Insistence on rigor of thought and logic.”
Tony Allott on Phil Silver, November 2022
Making room at the table
In March 2006, Silver and Horrigan retired as co-chief executives. Allott became chief executive, while the founders continued as non-executive co-chairmen. The change concluded a transition that had been underway for several years. For a founder, handing over the operating job is a consequential transaction of its own. The company's work must proceed under someone else's decisions.
The business they handed on recorded approximately $2.5 billion in net sales in 2005 and operated 60 manufacturing facilities in the United States and Canada. That year's shareholder letter also described $141 million of debt repayment. Earnings, debt and the next acquisition all occupied the same conversation. These were the working concerns of an industrial business, rather than a farewell performance for its founders.
Silver's connection to the board continued much longer. His chairmanship and co-chairmanship roles ended in March 2019; his service as a director ended on November 2, 2022. He had been a director since the company's founding, a span of 35 years. The sequence matters: the operating succession, the end of the chairmanship and the board retirement were separate steps, spread across more than a decade.
Portland, and a longer appointment
Portland brought the family closer together and opened another set of commitments. Phil and Barbara's foundation supports youth development across Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Its interests include sustained mentoring, reading support and preparation for college and careers. The geography is specific. So is the preference for organizations with clear goals and measurable outcomes.
The foundation describes an approach of approximately 40 grants a year, typically between $15,000 and $50,000, with multi-year support considered for programs showing sustained impact. Those amounts describe its usual grantmaking approach, rather than a promise about any individual award. They also suggest the level at which a family foundation can work: repeated commitments to organizations close enough to understand in detail.
Its grantees make that preference concrete. Friends of the Children in Portland builds long relationships between young people and professional mentors. Reading Results works with children who need help reaching reading benchmarks. College Possible helps students prepare for and complete higher education. Across these examples, the support continues through stages at which a young person could otherwise lose momentum.
These are different organizations doing different jobs. Their place together in the foundation's portfolio gives the phrase youth development some substance. A reading lesson, a reliable mentor and help navigating college admissions are particular interventions. They require people, time and continuity. There is no need to turn them into a grand metaphor to see why a donor might care about whether they work.
A family project with a future tense
In 2012, Barbara and Phil gave $200,000 to establish an endowed scholar award through the Portland chapter of ARCS Foundation. The award was designed to rotate every three years between two Oregon universities. An endowment gives a gift an extended timetable. The recipient changes, while the support is meant to continue. For the Silvers, education offered another way to make a commitment outlast its initial announcement.
Their sons also became trustees of the family foundation. By 2018, the next generation was getting involved as well. Silver described the ambition in terms of his children's place in their community. His compact description was “a family project.” It is a revealing choice of words for someone whose earlier project involved factories, acquisitions and a public company.
Silver's ownership connection to Silgan also persisted after his board service. A January 2026 filing reported beneficial ownership of 8,935,545 shares as of December 31, 2025, approximately 8.5 percent of the company. Retirement from the board had ended a particular responsibility; it had left him with a substantial economic connection to the enterprise he helped found.
The two strands of his life have different measures. Silgan's early expansion can be plotted in acquisitions and market share. The foundation's work turns toward reading, mentoring and what happens after a student enters college. Silver's career offers both kinds of timetable: the date a business changes hands, and the years that follow when people try to make something useful of the opportunity.