Do you ever mosey along the aisles of a vitamin store and wonder where all those strange sounding herbal medicines come from? Well, some of them come from a small corner of Glastonbury.
More specifically, they come from Biotech Corp. Int., on Oakwood Avenue. The privately held company, which has about 20 employees, makes and markets a number of the supplements and sundries you’d find along the shelves of Walgreens, CVS, General Nutrition Centers, Whole Foods, and a host of other vitamin shops in 25 countries.
The products sold by Biotech treat all sorts of things, like regrowing your hair, increasing your bust, and improving — at least physically — your love life. Company founder Gregory Kelly is something of an expert on the herbal remedies, among other things, having patented an herbal supplement that treats migraines, like the kind you’d get from talking on the phone all day.
Speaking of phones, another nearby small manufacturer, Essential Telecommunications on Sequin Drive, specializes in building really cool looking devices for phones. The 25-employee company designs, manufactures and sells special equipment like USB keypads and microphones, which are commonly found in the financial services and public safety industries.
Just up the street from Essential, which is near the heart of northern Glastonbury’s industrial area, between Routes 2 and 94, is a rather large manufacturer of a rather small product. It’s Projects Inc., Glastonbury’s second largest manufacturing employer with 100 employees, which makes custom-machined products for the aerospace industry.
But Projects Inc. is especially well-known for devices it makes called thermocouples. Thermocouples are electronic components used in aerospace and industrial applications that measure temperature differences between two metal points. That difference, called a temperature gradient, can generate tiny electrical charge, which can be used to measure relative temperatures.
As is the case with most of towns in Central Connecticut, aerospace suppliers and manufacturers like Projects Inc., are by far more common in Glastonbury. Habco Inc., just up Sequin Drive, is a 30-person manufacturer that specializes in building helicopter and industrial test equipment.
Also on Sequin Drive is British Precision Inc., a custom manufacturing supplier for the aerospace, automotive, textile, and printing industries that employs about 40 in its 15,000-square-foot factory.
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Kenneth J. St. Onge is associate editor of the Hartford Business Journal.
