This Is Not About a Grill Scrubber. It Is About American Manufacturing.

I am writing this one a little differently. I am just returning from vacation in South Texas, staying with a close friend of mine, John. We share a lot in common—our faith, our families, a love of kiteboarding and sailing, and a deep love for this country.

John also comes from a remarkable American military family. His father attended West Point, played quarterback for Army, and was coached by Vince Lombardi. He later served in Korea and Vietnam, commanded troops in combat, and ultimately retired as a Major General in the United States Army.

So when John and I talk about America, it is not abstract. We talk about responsibility, leadership, what previous generations built, what this country has given us, and what our generation has an obligation to preserve.

During one of those conversations, John told me I needed to watch a video from Destin Sandlin, the engineer behind Smarter Every Day. The premise sounded almost ridiculously simple: a guy wanted to make a grill scrubber in America.

By the time the video ended, I realized it was not really about a grill scrubber at all. It was about whether America still knows how to make things.

It Starts With a Grill Scrubber

Sandlin set out to develop a grill-cleaning tool and manufacture it in the United States. That may sound trivial, but that is exactly what makes the story so interesting. This was not a jet engine, a semiconductor fab, or an advanced weapons system. It was a relatively simple consumer product.

Yet making it in America required navigating injection molding, machining, tooling, stainless steel, specialized components, suppliers, and the people who actually know how to turn an idea into a physical product at scale.

There is also a very practical safety issue behind the Smarter Scrubber. Traditional wire-bristle grill brushes can shed tiny metal bristles that remain on the grate, transfer to food, and then be swallowed without anyone realizing it. This is not merely theoretical.

A 2026 study using U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission data estimated roughly 3,700 emergency-room visits involving grill-brush wire bristles between 2015 and 2023—more than 400 cases a year on average. Those bristles can become lodged in the throat or penetrate farther into the digestive tract, sometimes requiring surgical or other medical intervention.

In the video, Sandlin walks through that risk, and it is an uncomfortable reminder that something as ordinary as cleaning a grill can create a hazard most of us have probably never considered. It also explains one of the most important design decisions behind the Smarter Scrubber: using chain mail rather than the conventional wire bristles that can break loose and end up in your food.

What makes Sandlin’s story so compelling, though, is that solving the product problem was only the beginning. Building it in America required finding the right people, suppliers, equipment, tooling, materials, and manufacturing expertise to bring the idea to life. That is what the video ultimately reveals: American manufacturing is not defined by a factory building. It depends on an interconnected network of capabilities and know-how—and once that network disappears, it is extraordinarily difficult to recreate.

We Did Not Just Offshore Products

For decades, the economic logic behind globalization was compelling. Manufacture where production is most efficient, lower costs, improve margins, and give consumers better prices. That created enormous value, and global trade will continue to matter.

But I think we underestimated what else was moving overseas. We were not just transferring production. We were transferring capability.

When a factory closes, you do not only lose the building. You can lose the machinist who knows how to solve a problem nobody ever wrote down, the tool-and-die shop down the road, the specialized supplier, the apprenticeship program, and years of accumulated engineering knowledge.

Those losses compound over time. A company begins buying a component somewhere else. Eventually the domestic supplier disappears, the people who knew how to make it retire, and the machinery is sold, scrapped, or never replaced.

At some point, you discover that you did not merely outsource a product. You outsourced the ability to make it, and that is a much more serious problem.

The Industrial Base We Do Not See

Industrial capability often lives in businesses most Americans will never hear about: machine shops, mold makers, metal fabricators, tool-and-die companies, materials specialists, component manufacturers, and engineering firms. They are rarely household names, but they are the connective tissue of a manufacturing economy.

When those businesses weaken or disappear, it becomes harder to prototype, scale, repair, innovate, and respond when supply chains break. A country can have plenty of capital and world-class engineers and still lack the industrial capability required to turn a design into a product.

That distinction matters because capital alone cannot solve the problem. Capital can buy equipment, finance factories, and fund expansion. But it cannot instantly recreate decades of accumulated manufacturing knowledge, supplier relationships, skilled labor, and practical experience.

Once that capability is lost, rebuilding it takes time.

Cheap Is Not Always Cheap

I am not arguing that everything Americans buy should be manufactured in the United States. That is neither realistic nor desirable. Global trade matters, comparative advantage matters, and cost matters.

But resilience matters too. The cheapest supplier on a spreadsheet is not necessarily the cheapest supplier in the real world, particularly when that supplier becomes a single point of failure.

If a critical component becomes unavailable, shipping is disrupted, or geopolitical conditions change, the conversation quickly moves from price to dependence. At that point, the more important question becomes: Which things should a country simply know how to make?

Not everything, certainly. But more than we have been willing to admit.

Manufacturing Is Also About Stewardship

There is another part of this that matters to me. Manufacturing is not just economics. It is also stewardship.

It is about preserving skills, creating opportunities for people who want to work with their hands as well as their minds, and building businesses that can survive a generation. It is about passing down knowledge that cannot simply be learned from a manual and making sure the next generation inherits real industrial capability.

That does not mean romanticizing the past. American manufacturing has to be competitive, technologically advanced, efficient, and globally relevant. But there is a difference between modernizing an industrial base and allowing it to disappear.

We should know the difference.

Where Eliakim Capital Fits

Eliakim Capital is not a manufacturing company, and we are not pretending to be one. But we spend a great deal of time around businesses where capital, ownership, intellectual property, infrastructure, growth, and long-term strategy intersect.

That perspective makes one thing very clear. A company can have a great product, strong demand, and access to capital, but if it cannot actually produce at scale, none of the rest matters very much.

Manufacturing capability is part of enterprise value. So is supply-chain resilience. So is intellectual property. And so is the knowledge embedded in the people who actually know how to make the product.

For investors, operators, and business owners, that means manufacturing capability should not always be viewed simply as a cost center. In the right businesses, it is a strategic asset. Once that capability disappears, replacing it can be extraordinarily difficult.

So, John, I Am Sold

Which brings me back to South Texas, back to John, and back to a grill scrubber. I started watching a YouTube video about a guy trying to make a product in America. I finished it thinking about factories, machine shops, skills, supply chains, national resilience, and what kind of industrial base we intend to leave our children.

So, John, I am sold. I ordered a Smarter Scrubber yesterday . . .as soon as I get it . . .I am going to clean the grill.

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Todd Colpron is the Managing Partner of Eliakim Capital, a private investment and strategic advisory firm that invests its own capital and co-invests with a family office.

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