Dalton’s MFG Chemical serves companies in numerous industries

Dalton’s MFG Chemical serves companies in numerous industries

Each of these tanks at MFG Chemical’s Kimberly Park Drive location can fill the tanker of a semi-truck with chemicals that the company produces.

• Contributed photo

Dalton’s MFG Chemical has made a major push to upgrade its facilities during the last few years. From left are Vice President of Operations George Graham, CEO Paul Turgeon and Director of Environment, Health, Safety and Sustainability Joe Welch.

• Charles Oliver/Dalton Daily Citizen

An overhead view of MFG Chemical’s Kimberly Park Drive site.

• Contributed photo

From the water you drink to the gasoline you put in your car to the food you eat to the paint on the walls of your home, an additive made by Dalton’s MFG Chemical may have been used to produce it.

“You know the phrase ‘Intel Inside’ (about the central processing unit in some computers)?” said CEO Paul Turgeon. “That’s how some of our folks talk about what we do.”

Turgeon has been MFG’s CEO for the past two years and served on the board prior to that.

“We make a number of different additives that improve the efficiency of other processes,” said Turgeon.

Additives made by MFG make it easier to pump oil out of the ground. They help treat drinking water to make it safe. Other additives keep paint from dripping to the floor when walls are painted. and others help farmers evenly apply pesticides and fertilizers to their crops.

“There’s many other uses we could mention,” said Turgeon. “And they are all made here in Dalton. We are doing a lot of good things here.”

MFG Chemical was founded in 1980.

“This is a Dalton legacy business,” said Turgeon. “It was founded by the Gavin family, supplying chemicals to the carpet industry. Over the course of time the family decided it had gotten as big as they could grow it, and they didn’t have a succession plan, so they sold the company to Platte River Equity in Denver, Colorado. Platte River was founded by a man named Lanny Martin, who came from an industrial and manufacturing background. They’ve been very supportive of this business.”

MFG has facilities at three locations in Dalton: Brooks Road (the original site), Callahan Road (the second site) and Kimberly Park Drive (where the headquarters is also located).

While MFG was founded to serve the carpet industry, its focus has changed over the years.

“Over time, the carpet industry’s chemical uses changed, so this company pivoted and focused on other industries,” said Turgeon. “We actually do very little business now with

the carpet industry, which is ironic given that we are located in the Carpet Capital of the World. But this is still a great location for us, being on I-75. and the labor in Georgia is strong.”

Turgeon said the company’s customers are mostly based in the United States.

“We are primarily a domestic business,” he said. “But some of our Fortune 500 customers have foreign operations, and we supply them. But as a strategy we don’t focus on international markets but on the domestic.”

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic downturn in recent years, MFG pushed forward with a major upgrade to its Dalton facilities called Project Odyssey.

“MFG has made substantial investment in upgrading its facilities over the past couple of years,” said Joe Welch, director of environment, health, safety and sustainability. “We’ve installed upgraded DCS (distributed control systems). This helps us automate the controls of many of our operating systems. We’ve installed upgraded cooling systems, providing more stable cooling and more redundancy and reducing total water usage of all of our sites.”

George Graham, MFG’s vice president of operations, said the new DCS systems not only improve efficiency but safety as well.

“We’ve automated a lot of functions that used to be done by hand,” he said. “That reduces the chance for human error.”

The company has received multiple honors from industry group EcoVadis for its sustainability efforts.

Welch said the company has a strong focus on training for its 100 to 120 employees.

“We do a lot of work to make sure we are continuously improving safety at MFG,” he said. “We have a comprehensive training matrix, which includes operating procedures, environmental training, safety training. Training is very important.”

Turgeon said MFG executives want the company to be a place where people enjoy and feel comfortable working. Officials said its plants are operating at full-capacity and the company needs more workers from the Dalton area.