Manufacturing up the unexpected

When most of us hear the word manufacturing, a certain image probably comes to mind. I did a quick image search, and the results confirmed it: smokestacks, production lines, robots, heavy equipment and hard hats. 

Northwest Montana certainly has plenty of that. 

But this month’s Insights is a good reminder that manufacturing comes in a lot more shapes, sizes and smells than we might expect.

October is Manufacturing Month, and reporter Taylor Inman takes us inside a part of our local economy that probably does not immediately come to mind: the growing wellness industry. 

At Montana Global Health, raw ingredients arrive at an Evergreen facility and leave as capsules, powders and bottled drinks headed to customers across the country and around the world. President Terri Chichester has steadily added automation, increased production and is now preparing for a move into a 46,000-square-foot facility in Columbia Falls. 

That is manufacturing in Northwest Montana. 

So is a small production room at Montana Emu Ranch in the West Valley, where soaps, salves, lip balms and creams are made in batches. So is The Good Stuff Botanicals in Bigfork, where the owners may prefer to call themselves “tinkerers,” “concoctors” or even “mad scientists.” And so is Alpine Gold, where a chemistry teacher is building a young skincare company around a few carefully sourced ingredients. 

The scale is different. The products are different. But there is a common thread: figuring out how to make something well, how to make more of it without sacrificing quality and how to build a sustainable business around that process. 

That is an important part of the Northwest Montana economy. The Montana Manufacturing Extension Center counts more than 900 manufacturing establishments in Flathead County alone, while manufacturing wages across Northwest Montana totaled nearly $300 million in 2024. 

Those numbers are significant, but what interests me most are the businesses behind them.

Some are decades old. Some are just getting started. Some are investing millions in facilities and automation, while others are producing in small batches and deliberately choosing not to scale too quickly. 

All of them are making something here. 

That feels especially worth recognizing during Manufacturing Month because manufacturing has always been part of this region’s story, including our own. The Daily Inter Lake has been manufacturing newspapers since 1889, before Kalispell was incorporated, making us the city’s oldest manufacturer. 

In a typical week, we run through about 24 rolls of standard newsprint, each stretching more than six miles. Laid end to end, that paper would stretch roughly 144 miles, farther than the drive from Kalispell to Missoula, Superior or even Cut Bank. 

The equipment has changed quite a bit since then. The basic idea has not. 

Take raw material, add skill, judgment and a lot of work, and create something people find useful. 

That definition fits more businesses around here than we sometimes realize. 

Thank you for reading, and thank you to the manufacturers, makers, tinkerers and “mad scientists” who continue to build things in our region. And if you would ever like to see one of those six-mile rolls of newsprint, along with the press that turns it into a newspaper, our door is open.