Baraboo, Wis. — On March 16, 2020, just days after the global economy started to shut down in response to COVID-19, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb mentioned an obscure plastic product on Twitter.
"The weak link in supply chains are often low-margin products, where there's consolidated suppliers and relative underinvestment — precisely because the products are lower margin and therefore don't attract investment capital. Swabs could be a weak link in broadening testing," Gottlieb wrote.
Someone responded: "How hard is it to manufacture a swab?"
In Baraboo, Wis., the team at Teel Plastics LLC knew the answer to that question. And that's how the 71-year-old extruder and injection molder found itself in a global spotlight at the start of the pandemic.
Teel was primarily known for high-quality, tight-tolerance extruded tubing. Nasopharyngeal swabs? Not so much — at least not in early 2020.
But even before the pandemic started, Teel was a key supplier to Puritan Medical Products, a Guilford, Maine-based company that was one of only two companies in the world to specialize in medical swabs. Puritan was asked in March 2020 by then-Vice President Mike Pence to increase test kit production. In response, Teel adjusted its schedules and priorities to increase production of the swab stick handles for the flocked swabs used in Puritan's test kits.