Dayton Frozen Solutions

A long time Dayton company has expanded under a new name and invites the community to celebrate its growth.

(DFS) celebrated its expansion at 20 Eaker St., Dayton, during a Rib-

This little brick factory isn’t supposed to be here. It should be in the Philip- pines, or Vietnam, maybe China. Not here, in the heart of Texas.

Baseball gloves, like many other things, aren’t really made in America anymore. In the 1960s, production shifted to Asia and never came back. It might be America’s favorite pastime, and few things are more personal to base- ball-lovers than their first glove - the smell, the feel, the memory of childhood summers. But most gloves are stitched together thousands of miles away by people who couldn’t afford a ticket at Fenway Park.

One company didn’t get the memo. Since the Great Depression, Nokona has been making gloves in a small town outside Dallas with a long history of producing boots and whips for cowboys. There’s a livestock-feed store next door to the factory, which offers $5 tours for visitors who want bon Cutting and Open House held Friday.

on Frozen Solutions, formerly known as Termi- nal Cold Storage, has served the Dayton area for more than 75 years as a cold food storage facility. Under its new name and ownership, DFS will add a spinoff company, DFS Supply. This new business is already supply- to see how the “last American ball glove” is made. You can watch employees weave the webbing by hand, feed the laces through the holes with needles, and pound the pocket into shape with a rounded hammer. The Amer- ican flag gets stitched into the hide - and that, they say at Nokona, is more than just a business matter.

“Made in America means you believe in our country,” said Carla Yeargin, a glove inspector and tour guide at Nokona, where she worked her way up from janitor. “We

the love for the ballglove, because we made it here.”

And the final product could cost you 25 times more than a foreign-made version at the local discount store. Yes, that’s partly a reflection of the premium nature of the Nokona line but still it represents a huge challenge for the company, as well as for Donald Trump.

“Making it here” is a big deal for the president. Last month Trump staged a week of events to celebrate U.S. manufacturing, showcas- ing goods from businesses such as Grainger, HD Prod- ucts, Ferguson and more, but more growth is on the horizon.

DFS is owned by an investment group that includes Chad Diggs, CEO, William Lumpkin, CFO, and Dr. Michael Dulan. The group purchased Terminal Cold Storage in 2016 and soon ing products from Camp- bell’s soup to Caterpillar construction gear. July 17 was declared “Made in Amer- ica Day.”

“Restoring American man- ufacturing will not only restore our wealth, it will restore our pride,” Trump said.

The president loves to use his bully pulpit to advance the cause, but it doesn’t always work. Trump threatened Ford over its plan to shift assembly of Focus cars to Mexico - and so the auto- maker moved operations to China instead. Plus, modern factories rely more on auto- mation than ever, so even if production comes back, it might be done by robots.

There’s nostalgia - critics would call it fantasy - in Trump’s rhetoric. He harkens to a time when the U.S. was the world’s biggest man- ufacturer, and Fords rolled off the assembly line into the driveways of upwardly mobile households.

By now, “supply chains have been so heavily outsourced that it’s no longer after changed the busi- ness name and added four employees, growing the Dayton Frozen Solutions team to 21.

DFS now has a 120,000 square foot facility, which offers diverse storage options including dry storage and freezers kept at -10 degrees. possible to buy American for some products,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington who studies advances in manufacturing. “The suppliers don’t exist. In some instances it’s too lit- tle, too late.”

Trump’s message also represents a break from the globalization gospel preached by his predecessors as they pushed for trade deals that would bring emerging giants such as China into the capitalist fold. Offshoring production was seen as acceptable, because it would make American economies more competitive. That, added to cheap imports, would leave the U.S. economy better off.

Economists are waking up to the limits of that logic. Voters have been awake for a while - especially in the Rust Belt towns, hollowed out by industrial decline, which swung last year’s election for Trump.

“For 30 years, this country all but neglected any serious challenge to a globalist view of sourcing,” Muro said.

Shoppers are buying six-month food supplies wrapped in military-grade Mylar pouches, and kits filled with duct tape, food bars and an air-filtration mask.

Some companies that specialize in selling items to people planning for the worst — so-called doomsday preppers — say they have had a bump in sales recently, after tensions rose between the U.S. and North Korea. Online searches for prep- ping and survival gear have also jumped.

The increase in sales is a turnaround from recent months. Revenue fell after President Donald Trump’s election, according to three of the country’s larger retail- ers that specialize in selling emergency preparedness.

“The whole industry kind of took a little pause after the election of Trump,” said Brandon J. Garrett, director of marketing at The Ready Store, which sells a wide range of prep products online and via catalog. “I think everyone was kind of waiting to see what kind of leader he was going to be and where he would take the country.”

“This week, it kind of seemed that everything picked up,” he said.

Emergency gear has its own retail niche, with devotees attending conventions and manufacturers coming up with specialty products. Some in the industry trace its rise to the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans; others believe it was stoked by those who opposed President Barack Obama’s two terms.

Prepper companies sell a wide variety of wares, from 41-pound pails of pinto beans and freeze-dried roasted chicken to fire-starter devices and water filters. Like other retailers, the companies have set up online sites, complete with one-day sales and discount codes. There are also traditional retail emergency readiness stores around the country.

Emerge ncy Essentials operates four retail stores in Utah. The stores, in or near strip malls in towns outside Salt Lake City, look a little like Petco, but the aisles are filled with readyto-eat meals and solar generators instead of bags of kibble and litter.

T he company got its start almost 30 years ago selling to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the church stresses preparedness — but has expanded its business to serve a wider audience across the country, according to Kevan Allbee, a marketing manager for Emergency Essentials.

When Trump won, “sales started a downward decline,” Allbee said. “In short summary, what we understand is when the left is in power, the right panics.”

Shane Sullivan, the company’s president, said that sales at Emergency Essentials on Tuesday, after Trump made comments to reporters about North Korea, were double their usual amount. And revenue on Wednesday and Thursday surpassed what came in Tuesday.

“Clearly, when something happens in the world like North Korea right now, it is on people’s minds,” Sullivan said. “It just causes them to rethink where they stand in the event of war, in the event of job loss, in the event of a natural disaster.”

Not every company in the prepper industry has seen an uptick. Joe Marshall, managing editor of Survival Life, a website that supports an online retail operation and the Banana Bay Tactical shop in Austin, Texas, said it was too soon to see an impact on sales.

“The truth is, there’s been some chatter,” he said, “but for most of our people, they’re already preparing.”

Google searches for “prepper” hit their highest level in a month on Tuesday, while searches for “survivalism” neared a high last reached in July, according to Google Trends, a site from the technology giant that shows what users have been researching.

Keith Bansemer, vice president of marketing at My Patriot Supply, which sells bulk food, water devices and seeds, said customers have started snapping up the company’s six-month food supplies.

They wanted to do something to feel more secure, he explained.

By prepping, “you’re actually alleviating fear,” Bansemer said.