For one CA business, coronavirus both a boost and burden

For some U.S. companies - like California’s Emerald Packaging - the coronavirus outbreak is both a boon to sales and still a burden.

As the nation clamped down earlier this year with stay-at-home orders, demand for plastic bags of produce exploded.

Emerald Packaging owner Kevin Kelly – who sells plastic packaging for food, like licorice and cauliflower florets - says consumers saw packaged goods as safer than unwrapped produce.

“So in March, literally, probably in that those three weeks in March, our year-over-year and bookings increased 150 percent. And then in April, they increased 10 percent again.”

But while the novel coronavirus changed consumer habits, it also forced expensive changes at the company... about $350,000 in new and unexpected costs.

“For instance, we have six people walking around the factory right now cleaning full time, two each shift and they're cleaning all the spaces that the people who run the machinery don't clean. So guardrails, desks, and bathrooms.”

$10,000 was spent on six high-tech backpacks that these workers now use to hose down floors. The company is also taking temperature checks seriously, no matter the price tag.

"Right now, we're using the guns that you point someone's forehead, but we just spent $42,000 on a new system that will automate temperature checking as people walk in. So it's a computer system. It’s infrared, it picks up someone's temperature as they walked through the system.

But still, it's $40,000 for two systems. And that isn't an expense, that isn't a capital expense we planned for this year, wasn't in the budget.”

Kelly says he hasn’t increased his prices yet, because he knows many customers are in a pinch.

Recently - Kelly's biggest customer told him it was looking around at even cheaper options.