Puritan Medical Products: Manufacturing in the U.S. Is Thriving

The best is yet to come for manufacturing in the U.S., Puritan Medical Products leadership says in a new op-ed for Fortune (subscription).

What’s going on: “No business community is more dynamic than manufacturing,” wrote Puritan CEO Timothy Templet and Puritan Marketing Director Virginia Templet.

• “From the Industrial Revolution to post-World War II globalization and current debates about tariff rates, manufacturers have consistently found themselves in the spotlight or under scrutiny. And yet, we persevere.”
• The industry, they write, is a prime economic engine that benefits huge numbers of people around the globe every day. It creates scores of well-paying jobs and creates a multiplier effect that enables people to live out the American dream.

Speaking from experience: Puritan Medical Products, headquartered in Maine, “became North America’s largest supplier of COVID-19 testing swabs during the pandemic.”

• The family-owned business hired and trained hundreds of workers to make up to 100 million swabs a month.
• “Today, we are a trusted domestic manufacturer of swabs and single-use specimen collection devices for healthcare, diagnostics, forensics, controlled environments, and environmental sciences.”

A thriving sector: Despite some doom-and-gloom media reports in recent months, manufacturing in the U.S. is flourishing, as evidenced by the still-high number of open jobs in the industry.

• “[M]anufacturing firms like Puritan are looking for even more human talent to write our sector’s next chapter,” the Templets wrote, citing the figure of approximately 500,000 open jobs in the sector. “Despite the rise of artificial intelligence, we still need human capital … to write that chapter.”

The bottom line: Manufacturing’s pinnacle has yet to be reached, the authors concluded

• “On the 250th anniversary of America, there is cause for a lot of celebration—and a little concern too. But, now more than ever, we should keep the glass half-full.”