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's parent company is Hardwood Products Co.
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.” 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.