On October 12, 2020, Puritan announced a second major expansion in Pittsfield, Maine in a continued partnership with Cianbro. This second facility will complement Puritan’s first manufacturing plant in Pittsfield that was retrofitted by Cianbro at the beginning of 2020 at 129 N. Main Street to produce foam-tipped testing swabs. The new facility will be located at the former San Antonio Shoe manufacturing site and is expected to increase swab production by an additional 50 million swabs per month. Puritan Medical Products is one of two major facilities in the world—and the only one in North America— to produce swabs used in Covid-19 testing.

Puritan partnered with the United States Government and with Cianbro to retrofit both of the Pittsfield plants. The two new plants are funded by government grants in order to increase Covid-19 testing supplies. Design and construction planning activities on this second facility started in late September. The plant is expected to start producing swabs in January 2021. This project will bring more than 650 individuals including Cianbro team members, subcontractors, engineers, and architects together to retrofit the former shoe factory to produce swabs on an extremely aggressive schedule. The new facility will provide an additional 200 new jobs in Pittsfield, and a total of 600 once both Puritan manufacturing sites are fully operating.

The facility will include approximately 78,840sf of total building space including 38,330sf in three separate “clean” room manufacturing spaces for the production of flocked polyester swabs. An adjacent three-story brick building will be demolished to create space for future possible expansion by Puritan.

Construction started at the first facility on May 1, 2020. Teamwork and collaboration were key in keeping the project on schedule. More than 700 construction professionals worked on the project to meet the production startup for Puritan. Two short months later, on July 1, Puritan began production in their new Pittsfield ISO-8 clean room and now are producing 40 million swabs per month to meet the demand of testing supplies in our country.