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.

Editor Don Loepp visited Teel Plastics in Baraboo, Wis., in February for a tour and to interview leaders and workers.

Click here to watch a video of the visit.

Teel immediately began running them 24/7 and then added even more extruded and injection molded swab capacity, in part thanks to U.S. government funding. The company has made more than 2 billion swabs since the start of the pandemic.

For its response, and for its work with other customers in a wide variety of end markets, Teel is the 2021 PN Excellence Award for Customer Relations and a finalist for Processor of the Year.

Teel was established as a family-owned company by W. F. "Pete" Teelin in 1951, initially as Insemikit Co., a specialty manufacturer for the veterinary industry. Teelin foresaw a need for plastic to replace glass tubes used in artificial insemination of livestock. The company changed its name to Teel Plastics in 1958.

Jay Smith and his two children, Jason Smith and Brynna London, acquired the company in 1999. The company was named the PN Excellence Award winner for industry and public service in 2019. Teel was acquired by MPE Partners, a private equity firm, in 2020.

President Tom Thompson said Teel still makes some of the products it made in the 1950s, but in recent years it's focusing on a handful of high-growth markets.

"Over the 70 years, we've developed laboratory sampling bag products, pesticide bait sticks, compounding, injection molding, extrusion, with extrusion really being our bread and butter, was really what we're known for," Thompson said.

"All of our products are focused on a regulated market. They also are focused on really close-tolerance applications and many use highly engineered materials," he said.

"We really focus on specific markets that we're targeting. Medical is a big target market for us. Filtration and treatment is a big target, and industrial pipe," he said. Industrial pipe includes both conduit for fiberoptics and pipe used by natural gas utilities. Other markets include cosmetics and cores for flexible film manufacturers.

Teel has a modern, well-equipped analytical lab and offers a variety of secondary operations.

"There's a large amount of different capabilities that we can bring for solutions to our customers, and we are very good at adapting and making changes on the fly and also making different suggestions that our customers may want to implement to make their products better or more cost-effective or process better in their facilities," Thompson said.

"Usually a customer comes to us if they have a problem, and they ask us to come up with a solution, and the majority of time we're successful. And that makes us resilient and difficult to displace, because of the things that we develop for our customers," Thompson said.

"Our customers come to us because they don't have any other options, and we seem to find ways to solve their problems when no one else can," CEO Jerry Pritchett said.

Thompson cited a few medical products that Teel helped customers manufacture in 2021.

"We made products for a respiratory breathing device. We got a call from the CEO of our customer on New Year's Eve, and we were able to turn that around, get a new line installed and producing product in three weeks," he said.

"We were able to do that because of the urgency of it, really saving lives and making that big a difference. And our employees really got behind the effort. They were working a lot of hours to make sure we got that product out, and it really made a big difference because we were fighting the COVID pandemic," Thompson said.

And then there's COVID swabs. Teel expanded swab capacity thanks to a U.S. Department of Defense contract awarded in October 2020, which the company used to buy nine new Arburg injection molding machines and two Davis-Standard extruders focused on swab production. Teel also added 50 additional employees.

"We're probably the largest swab stick manufacturer in the U.S., if not the world. We made, in the last 18 months, probably 2 billion swab sticks. That includes both injection molded and extruded sticks, made from a variety of different materials and designs. So that's something we're really excited about, and we expect to see growth in that product, not just for COVID, but we're also making components for a lot other test kits that our customers are making and designing," Thompson said.

Thanks to increased federal spending on infrastructure, Teel is also bullish on the potential for conduit.

"We're making conduit that people will use to install fiberoptics, especially out in rural areas," Thompson said. "These are really important products, and our employees know that we're making a difference."

Thompson said 2021 was "a fantastic year" for Teel, which saw sales grow 40 percent.

"And that comes off a year, the previous year, that was well over 20 percent growth. So to put back-to-back years like that was just tremendous, especially in the time period of a pandemic," he said. "So we're really proud of that, and I think 2022 is going to be just as good if not a better year."

Christian Herrild, the company's director of growth strategies, said Teel retained its original culture even through changes in ownership.

"We really have a great culture here. I think it's been one of the things that has sustained us as a company as we've grown as much as we have in the past couple years. The credit for a big part of that has to go to Jay Smith, who was longtime president and CEO of the company," Herrild said.

"He really instilled strong values, wanting to be sure that people had a place they could come where they were proud to come to work, proud of the products that we made. They took pride in what they did every day. And then investing in people, investing in education, investing in training, investing in equipment, so that people could have long-term careers here."

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