By DAVE EISENSTADTER

Granite State News Collaborative Correspondent

Like so many other manufacturers in New Hampshire, just last week, Phil Mastroianni, co-owner of Salem-based Fabrizia Spirits, was facing closing up shop due to the coronavirus crisis. One of the company's main orders was put on pause, and Mastroianni was wrestling with having to lay off employees.

However, on Wednesday, March 18, the federal government issued a special allowance for distilleries like Fabrizia to stay open in order to produce much-needed hand sanitizer. By the following Monday, Fabrizia hand sanitizer was rolling off the production line, with three times as many employees as Mastroianni usually had on staff.

"Now we have over 300 requests from hospitals, police stations, and not just in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, which is our primary home base, but also New York and Los Angeles," said Mastroianni, who is 37 and lives in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.

Fabrizia, like some other manufacturers and distilleries have been finding ways to keep people working, keep their doors open and help the collective cause. While there are some limitations, these local solutions may be replicable in the right circumstances.

The distillery is only able to fulfill local requests — "we're not Proctor & Gamble," Mastroianni said — but the small New Hampshire distillery was able to shift gears to produce a different product relatively quickly, he added. 

That's in a large part thanks to Mastroianni's 11 years experience running the small business with his brother, Nick Mastroianni. Facing adversity in getting their brand of specialized liquor off the ground — they began with only $30,000 in capital — led the brothers to feel able to operate in an uncertain environment.

"We're used to things not being perfect and not being sure how things are about to play out," Mastroianni said.

After deciding they would do their best to put everything into making hand sanitizer, Phil Mastroianni took care of the supply chain and figuring out who would need it while Nick Mastroianni took care of setting up their production. As luck would have it, they held on to their original filling machine, which wasn't well suited to filling the alcohol bottles they needed for their normal business, but wound up working well on the small four- and eight-ounce plastic bottles they eventually bought for the hand sanitizer.

The largest expense the business incurred in embarking on creating hand sanitizer involved buying $12,000 worth of plastic bottles. Phil Mastroianni said they needed to cut the bottles to get them to the right size, and they now have an employee whose job is simply to cut bottles all day. He bought other supplies, including shrink wrap and industrial blow dryers that assist in packaging.

The business went from four production employees to 12 to ramp up. Many of the new recruits came from people they knew — wives of landscape workers their father hires, as well as product tasters they work with who are now out of work.

With the new people involved, and working in tighter quarters, Mastroianni said they have instituted new safety protocols to maintain social distance and keep employees from spreading the disease.

The door to the facility is locked and a security camera with a speaker was installed so that they can inform customers that they are not seeing people in the production facility. Workers wear masks at all times and the stations are set up to be six feet apart in most cases. They also hired a person whose sole job is to spray clean the many surfaces, many of which are stainless steel, which is suspected to be a fairly hospital place for the virus to linger for multiple days.

"We're getting better at it every day," Mastroianni said. "We're also making hand sanitizer so we're spraying that a million times."

Mastroianni said it is important to maintain safety because people are counting on getting the hand sanitizer. He said the company is donating about 20 percent of the product to hospitals and police and fire stations, and there are many requests from such facilities. 

Apart from the donations to hospitals and first responders, the business sells the sanitizer to stores for sale to the public.

He is also concerned about safety for the sake of his own family, which includes three children, the youngest of which is six weeks old.

"My wife isn't happy; she's mad at me for staying open and going to work," Mastroianni said, but added that he's shown her the grateful emails and photos sent by hospitals and other facilities they've donated to, as well as the desperate ones sent by parents of first responders requesting sanitizer for their children working on the front lines.

As for the difficulty of making the product, Mastroianni said it is far easier to make than the specialized liquor they are used to making. There are four ingredients — ethanol, glycerin, hydrogen peroxide and water, which all are combined at certain percentages laid out by the government.

Nevertheless, there have been hiccups along the way. One of the first batches was produced in a machine that had not been thoroughly cleaned of an Italian lemonade drink they make, and they had to dispose of the entire batch.

Mastroianni jokes that in the parlance of the liquor world, what the company is making is essentially "hand-crafted hand sanitizer." On a good day, they are able to produce between 600 and 700 cases a day. Each case contains either 12 eight-ounce containers or 24 four-ounce containers.

He believes they can maintain that, but things have been changing quickly. If one of his employees comes down with the disease, he believes they would shut down immediately.

"We just hope all our employees stay safe and no one gets sick," he said.

These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.