Like so many other manufacturers around the world, a company whose founders hail from Barrie is making the switch to help in the fight against COVID-19.
Kruve, a small company which usually manufactures specialty coffee equipment, is switching gears to make protective shields that can be used in places such as face-to-face points of sale to prevent the coronavirus from spreading.
The company, which launched in 2015, includes Barrie founders Marek and Adam Krupa as well as their brother, Karol, alongside another set of brothers, Mark and Mike Vecchiarelli.
The company is now making scalable, mass-market protective shields for a variety of workers, such as pharmacists, bank tellers, gas station attendants, or anyone else who stands behind a counter and interacts with people on a daily basis.
Although the products are made at facilities in Brampton and Toronto, the company's first prototypes were installed in Barrie pharmacies — including Pharmasave on Essa Road — to test the new products.
"We’ve had prototypes out in the field in local pharmacies for a week now and the staff is very happy to have them," said Marek Krupa, the company's chief financial officer.
The shields are made from a ridged corrugated cardboard with a plastic film on the front made from the same durable material soda bottles are made from.
Mark Vecchiarelli, Kruve's chief marketing officer, called it a "made-in-Canada solution" for a global problem.
"The gravity of the situation is less questionable now," he said. "There's a need, and there's a lot of people, even in our own families, who are older, so it's important to at least reduce the spread as much as possible."
The company's goal is to make them affordable, with a retail cost of between $20 and $22 (Cdn), unlike plexiglass, which is expensive and could cost anywhere from $200 to $1,000 per shield.
"We really wanted to start with whatever we could help with, and one of the quickest and easiest to implement solutions was cardboard shield with a polyethylene or transparent window on the front," Vecchiarelli told BarrieToday. "It's durable enough that it will last for quite some time."
They also wanted to make something that was easy and fast to install.
"These are great for anyone who wants a quick solution," added Vecchiarelli, noting they can also be connected together to create a wall or barrier.
The company, whose business has been "heavily affected" by COVID-19, switched over to manufacturing the shields a little over a week ago. They say they can scale the process quickly to hundreds of thousands of units per week.
The first units will be ready to ship next week.
"We're going as quickly as we can, but there are obviously a lot of moving pieces," Vecchiarelli said. "The growth will be pretty rapid and that's another thing that was great for us."
Kruve officials also say this is not profit-driven for them and they want to make the shields widely available. They're giving away the plans for free under an open-source, creative commons licence so other companies can make these around the world.
They also plan to donate some of the proceeds to public-health agencies, possibly the World Health Organization (WHO).
For more information on the shields, click here.
