Kacee Vasudeva is the 1st Indian Industrialists in Canada. He started Max-Flow in 1977 & Mastercut (Tool division) from his garage and built it into a $100 Million group of six manufacturing plants. When the company got into financial troubles in 2009 during the worldwide crises, Kacee looked at new ventures. He created BEAPCO & Green-Strike to eliminate bed bugs & mosquito problem between 2010-12
Today when the world is gripped in COVID crisis and numerous organizations are shutting down their operations, Kacee and his team are working round the clock, 7 days a week to develop innovative products/ solutions to fight this problem. His company has filed 10 patents for COVID related products in last 2 months and launched its own Made in Canada COVID-19 line of products for individuals as well as businesses.
“We have come out with A to X solution to COVID-19,” remarks Kacee in a cheerful way. “It had been A to Z solution if we could develop test kits and vaccination for this deadly virus.”
However, things were not always this cheerful when crises began in early March. A chunk of the company’s workforce either had to leave or work from home because schools and day care centers across the country had closed. The automotive industry had already started showing signs of recession. This led Specialty Innovations, the manufacturing unit of Maxtech to cut its operations in half. Then with retail chains closing their physical operations, sales revenue for BEAPCO & Green-Strike took the biggest hit in the last decade.
As they say, “Cometh the moment, Cometh the man!”
Kacee decided to shift gears. He started focusing on manufacturing of PPE for frontline workers and related products that would solve the sanitization problems for both individual consumers and industry.
His company even partnered with professors at University of Waterloo and higher-ups at Waterloo Wellington Local Health Integration Network to design and develop technological innovations that could solve the scarcity of N95 masks using UVC & Ozone. The team also came up with a brilliant idea of converting a regular CPAP machine into non-intrusive ventilator.
At present Maxtech is firing on all cylinders as far as manufacturing of COVID19 products is concerned. To put things into perspective, it is manufacturing almost 50,000 face shields and 5,000 Liters of Hand Sanitizer in a week. Not only this it has got majority of online retail stores interested in some highly innovative products like UVC Sanitizing Flashlight & Clean Band- a portable wrist band with hand sanitizer. In last 6 weeks they doubled their workforce while people were being laid-off at other places.
“I have always been about Made in Canada,” quips Kacee. “It pained me to see my country suffer- either because of faulty PPE from China or rationing of PPE export into Canada by other countries. Nothing motivated more than this to develop my A to X COVID19 solution.” No better way for a minority to step up for his country for last 48 years.