CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Honeywell International Inc. has a new deal to produce at least 750 million nitrile exam gloves in the United States.
Premier Inc., a supply chain company serving the health care industry, will purchase the gloves to be used at thousands of hospitals and other health care providers across the country.
Premier, based in Charlotte along with Honeywell, has a customer base of more than 4,100 hospitals and 200,000 other providers.
The new agreement expects to produce at least 750 million gloves during the first year.
The move to create an additional source of U.S.-made gloves comes amid a larger push to return manufacturing to domestic soil after COVID-19 strained the worldwide supply chain and led to shortages and higher prices.
Most gloves, these days, are imported from Southeast Asia. But severe shortages of personal protective equipment including gloves and masks created problems for health care workers at the heights of the pandemic.
"Honeywell and Premier share a commitment to increase the domestic production capacity for safety solutions to help to protect American health care workers," said Praveen Reddy, president of Honeywell's PPE business. "Our N95 respirators are protecting millions of health care workers, and now we're bringing our technical and supply chain management expertise to support another category of essential PPE."
Premier CEO Michael Alkire called the project with Honeywell "another step forward in Premier's steadfast commitment to protect health care providers from shortages, drive supply chain innovation and increase domestic manufacturing of critical products."
A portion of production also will supply gloves to S2S Global, a subsidiary of Premier, for sale to health care systems and hospitals in the U.S. outside of Premier's network.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.