Texas chocolate factory now making medical face shields for hospitals

Texas chocolate factory now making medical face shields for hospitals

A chocolate factory owned by a Southern Baptist couple is among many U.S. factories that have converted their normal operations to instead make medical face shields to supply hospitals with personal protective equipment.

Michael and Angie Moss own Sweet Shop USA, the largest handmade chocolate manufacturer in the country, in Mount Pleasant, Texas.

On March 20, Michael Moss woke up with an idea to make medical face shields. He contacted a vendor in New York who usually supplies the chocolate factory with packaging and asked if he could cut plastic shields with a die cut machine. The vendor told Moss he was planning to close his doors the following Monday because of a lack of orders, and he was delighted to have something to make, Angie Moss said.

“We presold in the first three days almost 300,000 facial shields,” she said, adding that many hospitals usually order from manufacturers overseas, such as in China, but the pandemic has severely disrupted those supply chains.

The face shields now produced at the chocolate factory are called “Waymaker,” Moss said, because Isaiah 43:16–19 has been important to them in recent days. The passage says in part, “Behold, I am doing a new thing. Do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the desert.”

To make the shields, Sweet Shop USA converted its packing area — 20,000 square feet of the 80,000 square feet facility. They set up tables “sort of like stations, and we’re trying to practice social distancing. They’ve got masks on too, trying to keep everybody safe,” Moss said. (BP)