Food service supplier Cres Cor expands portfolio with product for first responders

Cres Cor introduced its Cres Guard cabinets for first responders in 2021.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted a lot of companies' usual approach to business.

For some, like Cres Cor in Mentor, it provided a new path forward.

Cres Cor, a longtime maker of products like heated cabinets for the food service industry, in the past year began serving a new market with a new product: decontamination cabinets for first responders.

Cres Cor got its start in 1936 as a job shop in Cleveland, said chairman Cliff Baggott. During World War II, the family-owned company made a lot of military products, but after the war was over, it turned to a different area of high demand: food service. People were eating out more, Baggott said, and franchises were taking off. Food products needed to be delivered, and they needed to be kept warm. The company has created hundreds of products over the years to meet those needs, Baggott said.

"That's brought us up and been our main driver for all those years," he said.

Cres Cor, which employs about 150, makes all of its products in Mentor. Baggott, who recently took on the role of chairman for the company, passing the role of president to his son, Greg Baggott, declined to share annual revenue for the family-owned business.

While Cres Cor, which moved to Mentor in the late '90s, has weathered other downturns, the pandemic posed a particularly strong challenge as restaurants shut their doors and stopped placing orders. The company had tried over the years to create new products for different markets, but they hadn't gotten a foothold. One that's still in progress is drying and decontamination products for the sports industry. But any growing interest in that space had also dried up in the face of a pandemic.

Still, during the early days of COVID-19, Baggott said Cres Cor realized they had a potential solution to the pressing need to decontaminate masks, using its metal-based core competencies and heat and humidity.

The company sought help from University Hospitals to vet its technology.

University Hospitals set up an internal task force focused on personal protective equipment needs — making, sourcing or reusing PPE — early in the pandemic, said Kipum Lee, vice president of innovation and product strategy at UH Ventures. The decontamination product from Cres Cor fit what the hospital system was looking into in terms of the reuse of PPE. The claim that the company could decontaminate N95 masks without chemicals, just using heat and water, was intriguing, he said, but it needed to be proven out.

UH Ventures, with physician-scientists Dr. Shine Raju and Dr. Amrita John, took some of Cres Cor's prototypes and tested them out for free, checking under what conditions they would work, the time it would take and more. The results were "promising," Lee said. The technology achieved "log 6," he said, or "99.9999 efficacy" in terms of disinfection.

Baggott said Cres Cor started to seek FDA emergency approval, but the pandemic began to wane and mask supply caught up to demand before it was granted. But Cres Cor didn't abandon its new idea; it just shifted its focus.

The company learned that its approach to quick decontamination could serve first responders like firefighters.

The majority of calls firefighters are responding to aren't fires, Baggott said; they're EMS calls. And they're dealing with biological hazards, like viruses or bed bugs, on a regular basis.

The metal Cres Guard mobile decontamination cabinet uses heat and humidity, not chemicals. It's a manageable size at about 6 feet tall and 2.5 feet by 2.5 feet wide. And press materials from Cres Cor note that the decontamination cabinet takes 15 minutes to clean gear, versus an hour-long wash cycle and 24 to 48 hours of drying that more traditional methods might take.

Cres Cor asked University Hospitals if it had the capacity to run more tests on the first responder product, and the system ultimately decided it did not, Lee said. But they gave an "indirect stamp of approval," he added, giving the company advice on how to best test it.

"They took that, ran with it, and we're so excited for where they are today," Lee said.

After the company again verified that its technology was decontaminating products to a high standard, it began networking and attending trade shows. Since the fall of 2021, the company has sold about 65 units, Baggott said.

One of those customers was the nearby Mentor Fire Department.

The department purchased five of the cabinets, one for each station, said Robert Evans, the department's deputy chief of staff. Before, the department had to rely on its three industrial washing machines. In addition to the long wash and dry cycle, the department's gear had to travel to where those machines were located. The Cres Guard cabinets are less expensive, and they're portable.

And what makes the decontamination cabinets really stand out is the "quick turnaround time," Evans said, helping the department get equipment back in service fast.

Baggott said the awareness of the need for sanitation has increased drastically because of the pandemic, and the company has the opportunity to find more ways to offer that with their products.

Baggott said there are now other, related products in development, though he couldn't share details.