New Vaughan facility to produce 1M 'North American quality’ face masks a week

‘We’ve learned the lesson,’ Pajot said when commenting on Canada’s dependency on foreign manufacturing

Yorkregion.com
July 10, 2020
Dina Al-Shibebb

A new manufacturing company, Hygia Health, is scheduled to officially launch Tuesday, July 14 with an aim to produce at least one million disposable face masks a week to curb Ontario’s dependency on foreign-made personal protective equipment (PPE).

Childhood friends Sean Keenan, president of the new company, and Mark Pajot, vice president, are behind the launch of Hygia Health, which aims to produce 200,000 masks a day for both medical and everyday use at the over 13,000-square-foot facility.

The company had its soft launch more than a month ago and is working in partnership with Pia Automation to produce these “premium quality disposable face masks.”

“We’ve learned the lesson,” Pajot said when commenting on Canada’s dependency on foreign manufacturing.

“Internationally, I think we've become dependent with a lot of the deregulation, our agreements with free trade etcetera, etcetera,” Pajod added, describing how Ontarians have “become dependent on, for instance, Chinese manufacturing, right? To produce low-cost goods.”

And it’s not just the quantity that has been an issue, it’s also the quality.

With the entry of “fraudulent” and “counterfeit” products into the local markets, not only from China but also internationally, “We exposed consumers ... on people’s faces. And it’s a big issue,” he says of the risks with low-quality masks.

The company is en route on making the masks ASTM F2100 certified to start selling for medical use.

Pajot said Hygia Health applied about a month and a half ago to test these masks for medical use through a company and they were given about 10 business days to finally do so.

However, after follow-up, “it turned out that the federal government; all the other governments pushed all of the private sector manufacturers who are producing, they pushed all their tests aside, so that so that they can get their Chinese materials tested.”

This need to keep quality control over these foreign imports is “affecting everybody,” including the companies conducting the tests.

“So, they bumped us 20 days,” he said.

“That's one of the other reasons we wanted to create a North American-only made product, just to have that reliability of quality that we manufacture here in Canada.”

Named after the goddess of good health in ancient Greece, the company has plans to have up to 20 machines in their facility. In addition, the wholesale price for customers who want to buy a million would be “30 or 45 cents each,” Pajot said. However, for those individuals buying a box of 50 masks, it would cost about $50 with material all sourced from North America.