Gloved up
Christchurch’s Eagle Protect™ is cleaning up the world’s food and medical industries, one glove at a time, by revealing a shocking truth.
Steve Ardagh is known in the United States as ‘the Glove Guy’. A Lincoln University graduate who worked in marketing, Steve sought to start a business in a category that was global, massive – and ripe for improvement. He chose gloves.
Each year in the US, over a hundred billion disposable gloves are used across food handling, medical, law enforcement, industrial, and cannabis industries.
In 2006, Steve and partner Lynda Ronaldson founded Eagle Protect to supply New Zealand industries. Today, Eagle supplies about 80 per cent of the local primary processing companies and, for the past decade, has made inroads into iconic US food brands and sectors such as sheriff departments for Eagle’s fentanyl-resistant gloves.
Along the way, Steve made a shocking observation when visiting factories in Southeast Asia, that manufacture most of the world’s glove supply. Water used in manufacturing was being drawn from polluted streams and combined with cheap ingredients. The result is that a substantial proportion of gloves contain chemical and microbial contaminants that could pose risks to food safety and public health.
“Something was very wrong with this picture,” says Steve. “Gloves are meant to protect, not infect.”
His next step, to ensure differentiation for Eagle Protect, was to become the first NZ B Corp™ certified company in 2012, and the world’s first and only glove specialist until last year.
“The values of B Corp of inclusion, accountability, and transparency strongly aligned with our values,” says Steve.
Eagle’s years of research into glove contamination culminated this month in a breakthrough paper in the prestigious Journal of Food Protection, highlighting hazardous chemical and pathogenic glove contamination. Eagle has developed a proprietary, patented glove quality verification programme to ensure a line of Eagle gloves adhere to the highest level of consistent glove safety and performance.
Steve spends a good deal of his time in the US working with distributors and corporate purchasers, as well as speaking at food safety conferences about the hidden truth of gloves.