# Puritan Medical Products

Puritan Medical Products is an American manufacturer of swab, diagnostic, and specimen collection products. Puritan is North America's largest manufacturer of COVID-19 testing swabs.
Based in Guilford, Maine, Puritan was a subsidiary of Hardwood Products Co., LP (its two subsidiaries being Hardwood Products Co., LLC and Puritan Medical Products Co., LLC), but has since split from Hardwood Products. Guilford has been described as America's "swab capital," with Puritan's manufacturing reportedly ushering in the "golden age of the swab."
Puritan operates three facilities in Maine (one in Guilford and two in Pittsfield), as well as a manufacturing plant in Orlinda, Tennessee, producing swabs and diagnostic testing supplies. In June 2022, Puritan was named "Innovator of the Year" by the Maine International Trade Center.

## History

Established in 1919, Puritan began as a producer of mint-flavored toothpicks in Saginaw, Michigan. The business moved to Maine in 1920, where white birch (needed for the toothpicks) was plentiful. Puritan eventually pivoted into the medical field with the introduction of tongue depressors and aseptic wood applicators, and in the mid-1970s began to focus specifically on medical and healthcare products.

## Leadership

Puritan is a family-owned business. The company is led by co-owner Timothy Templet, who serves as executive vice president of sales. Templet's grandfather, Lloyd Cartwright, founded Puritan in 1919 during the influenza pandemic. His daughter, Virginia Templet, serves as Puritan’s manager of marketing.
A business advocate, Templet urges American workers to join small companies and other private-sector employers as a way of combating labor shortages. He also believes in proactively bracing for the next global health crisis, claiming the COVID-19 pandemic was a "wake-up call about stockpiles and being prepared." Puritan urges people to practice vigilance in the face of new COVID spikes by continuing to test for emerging variants.
Bob Shultz is the president and CFO at Puritan. He is focused on recruiting workers from rural parts of Maine and Tennessee to join the company. Derek McKenney serves as Puritan's director of corporate engineering.

## COVID-19 pandemic

In April 2020, Puritan received over $75 million from the U.S. Department of Defense to produce more "flock tip testing swabs," which are preferred for COVID-19 testing. In June 2020, President Trump visited the company, highlighting its "noble tradition of American manufacturing excellence for more than 100 years." In July 2020, Puritan received another $51 million from the Defense Department to "expand industrial production capacity of flock tip testing swabs." To meet demand, the company partnered with Cianbro Corp. to open another swab production facility in Pittsfield, Maine. Granted federal funding to churn out 40 million swabs per month, the new Pittsfield facility is hiring and training hundreds of workers to produce up to 100 million swabs a month. In total, the federal government provided Puritan with more than $250 million in funding to accelerate COVID-19 testing swab production.
In November 2020, Puritan was awarded over $11 million to produce three million more testing swabs per month, with the money coming through the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act.
In December 2020, Inc. named Puritan the magazine's "Company of the Year," describing it as "the most important manufacturer in the world." Governor Janet Mills praised Puritan for "stepping up during tumultuous times to meet the needs of our state." According to Bloomberg, Puritan offers full benefits and pays fully trained employees $15 an hour, higher than the $12.15 hourly minimum wage in Maine.
In April 2021, Puritan announced plans to open a new manufacturing and distribution center in Tennessee, expanding the company’s national presence. With construction underway, the Tennessee plant will create as many as 625 new jobs over the next five years. In addition to accessing a larger workforce than in Maine, Puritan chose the Tennessee location for "the location, logistics, and incentives offered by Tennessee state and county development officials."

## Other work

In addition to manufacturing COVID-19 testing swabs, Puritan is also active in the environmental, forensics, genetics, and microbiology media industries, among others. This includes the production of environmental surface sampling kits.
In September 2023, Puritan partnered with GenoTyping Center of America, a Maine-based genetic testing company, to produce specialty swabs that collect DNA from rodents without the need to use a surgical procedure or harvest a fresh tissue sample from each rodent. Improving animal welfare, the new genotyping process is a DNA collection method that supports necessary biological research. Heather Johnson, commissioner of the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development, claims the partnership "illustrates the growth of Maine’s life sciences industry."
In October 2024, Puritan announced a hiring spree, eyeing 50 employees to add to its roster of 450 workers. The company cited orders being up 45 percent from pre-pandemic levels, including demand for U.S.-made testing products for the flu, RSV, strep, and COVID.