Ford Motor Company partnered with 3M in March to develop powered air-purifying respirators and personal protective equipment, and now the supplies are on their way to frontline healthcare workers dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic across the country.
Jim Baumbick, vice president of enterprise product line management at Ford, told Cheddar on Wednesday that the company began shipping respirators to hospitals on Monday and has the capability of producing 12,000 units a week.
"We've prepared to actually build all of the elements of personal protection and ventilators as long as necessary, even as we start to roll in to return to work and crank up the production sites for our normal products," Baumbick said.
Ford is certainly not known for making respirators, but the vice president said they are still ensuring the highest quality in their products as if they were making their normal devices.
"We're taking all kinds of our normal quality approach and standards," Baumbick said. "We're used to building very very complex devices at very high volumes," he said.
In the last 45 days, Ford Motor Company has shipped more than 12 million face shields and 300,000 hospital gowns, which have been in high demand, to cities across the country, according to Baumbick.
"We learned a lot about things like gowns," he said. "This is where getting innovative, thinking about using airbag material, as an example, has enabled us to develop a gown, an isolation gown for these ICU wards, that is reusable, washable up to 50 times," Baumbick said.
Kraft Heinz is splitting into two companies a decade after they joined in a massive merger that created one of the biggest food companies on the planet. One of the companies will include brands such as Heinz, Philadelphia cream cheese and Kraft Mac & Cheese. The other will include brands like Oscar Mayer, Kraft Singles and Lunchables. When the company formed in 2015 it wanted to capitalize on its massive scale, but shifting tastes complicated those plans, with households seeking to introduce healthier options at the table. Kraft Heinz's net revenue has fallen every year since 2020.
About 780,000 pressure washers sold at retailers like Home Depot are being recalled across the U.S. and Canada, due to a projectile hazard that has resulted in fractures and other injuries among some consumers.
President Donald Trump has fired one of two Democratic members of the U.S. Surface Transportation Board to break a 2-2 tie ahead of the board considering the largest railroad merger ever proposed.
Ford is recalling more than 355,000 of its pickup trucks across the U.S. because of an instrument panel display failure that’s resulted in critical information, like warning lights and vehicle speed, not showing up on the dashboard.
