Made in Colorado

Colorado is home to “the 50-yard line of the natural foods industry” in Boulder. It’s also the top state in the nation in terms of aerospace workers per capita and an emerging center for the quantum computing industry. Scads of manufacturers craft outdoor gear in cities large and small, and there are hundreds of craft breweries and distilleries similarly speckling the flatlands and high country.

There’s a definite maker state of mind here. Industriousness, even stubbornness, permeates the manufacturing mentality: “Sure, we can make it, and we can probably make it better.”

That goes for all 10 of the companies profiled in this year’s “Made in Colorado” edition, along with the winners and finalists of our 2024 awards. These manufacturers are breaking conventions and blazing new trails in industry after industry, and many of them say it’s not unusual for collaboration to overshadow competition.

They also say that Colorado is just the place for manufacturers to reach for the stars. We’ve proven adept at building spacecraft heading in that direction. And we’re a bit closer than the states down there at sea level.

The profiles that follow – makers and products in 10 industries – represent the ingenuity and bold entrepreneurialism that abounds in Colorado.

Thomas Hoffman founded Campworks in 2019 to make solar-powered teardrop campers for off-road expeditions. The NS-1, an all-electric, one-piece composite trailer, is the result.

An early buyer, Mat Hager joined Campworks as COO in early 2024. “As a customer, I saw that Campworks was trying to scale, was trying to grow their output, and was struggling,” Hager says.

Hager helped steer the company to shift some of the assembly to C.F. Maier Composites’ facility in the southeastern Colorado town of Lamar. The supplier of Campworks’ shells, Maier now also builds the base NS-1 model (starting at $33,500), which are shipped to the Front Range for finishing and upgrades.

By leveraging contract manufacturing, the three-employee Campworks has delivered about one every month since, with a 75-day window from down payment to delivery. The partnership with C.F. Maier has been a huge part of that. “I spend at least one day a week down there, sometimes more,” Hager says. “It’s really great to be part of a community that once had so many manufacturing jobs for skilled folks and being able to bring back some of those jobs.”

Hager touts the NS-1’s “general build quality and durability” and electric features. An induction stove and solar panels are standard on the NS-1 Electrified (starting at $57,000), one of three iterations of the camper. The NS-1 Electrified Pro (starting at $85,000) adds an on-demand water heater and enough power to charge an EV.

“It’s a convenience factor,” Hager says. “I can pull up the camp in mine, in my trailer, and have the kitchen going in less than 30 seconds.

“Before I came to Campworks, I camped 30 to 35 days a year in my rooftop tent,” he adds. “I tried to work remotely as often as I could, and . . . it was always a challenge to power everything off of a little power bank or off the vehicle.

On the other hand, the NS-1 allows remote workers to work from the woods wherever they can get coverage. “If it’s sunny, you can recharge your batteries,” Hager says.

 The Munro family has been doing business on Colorado’s Western Slope since 1900, when Fred Munro opened Munro Mercantile in Rifle.

In 1965, Fred’s grandson and great-grandson, Jack and Allen Munro, respectively, launched Munro Supply, a pump distributor in Grand Junction. About 20 years later, the Munros started manufacturing their own line of pumps.

“My dad had worked with several of his pump vendors to help them improve their products,” says Katie Munro Powell, Allen’s daughter and president of Munro Companies, the holding company for both Munro Pump and Munro Supply. “When you help your vendors improve their products, you get the personal satisfaction of doing that, but not a lot of other reward, especially in that they will then sell those products to your competition.”

It follows that Allen decided to go into manufacturing pumps himself with a focus on the irrigation market. “His vendors were talking about improvements in the cost to manufacture their product, as opposed to improvements that made a difference to the end user of their products,” explains Powell. “You don’t really see that happen much where a distributor breaks off and starts a manufacturing company.”

Regardless, it’s become a differentiator. “Because we still operate both businesses, I think it gives us a unique perspective as a manufacturer that sells into distribution,” she says. “We understand the pain points of our customers in a very unique way, and I think we are able to be an exceptional partner because of that.”

Munro Pump now makes pumps, controls, valves, and other products for the irrigation market, focusing on the turf and landscape segment, with new products hitting the market in 2025. No matter the product, durability and ease of maintenance are key features.

“Nobody wants to work on their pump. Nobody even wants to think about their pump,” Powell says. “That’s our overarching thought process when we’re innovating.”

Powell first worked for the family business as a high-schooler in the early 1990s. “My first job was actually building pump start relays on our assembly line,” she says.

For 20 years, she lived elsewhere, including Winter Park, New York and Denver, and worked in finance, advertising, telecom and higher education before rejoining Munro Companies in 2012. She hasn’t looked back.

“I love living in Western Colorado. It’s a wonderful community, and I think it is a strong and thriving business community,” Powell says. “I think I appreciate it even more having left.”

AlloSource was formed by the merger of Mile High Tissue Bank with tissue banks in St. Louis and Chicago in 1994. “A central processing facility made sense,” says Dean Elliott, president and CEO.

The nonprofit organization is a major processor of allograft tissue used in transplants and other medical procedures. “Allograft tissue is used for a variety of different things, from the treatment of severe burn injury to reconstruction following breast cancer treatment to repairing ligaments following sports injuries,” Elliott says. “We honor the gift of donation of human tissue that we further process and enable surgeons and other health-care providers to deliver that tissue to treat a variety of diseases and different types of conditions that patients suffer from, and we’re typically able to help those patients have a better life.”

Tissue banks in Buffalo and Des Moines joined AlloSource in 2006 to make it a five-member organization. “We process those allograft tissues for all five of those OPOs [organ procurement organizations] here,” Elliott says. “We distribute not only to those communities, but across the United States and in about 26 countries around the world.”

The 500-employee organization’s headquarters in Centennial features 37 ISO-rated cleanrooms. “We use a number of proprietary processes and techniques to clean that tissue, to shape that tissue, and to put it into a form that surgeons can use,” Elliott says.

AlloSource then ships a wide range of cartilage, bone and tendon products to eight distribution centers in the U.S. Elliott says the decentralized inventory accelerates delivery to health-care providers. “It’s not uncommon for us to get a phone call from the OR saying, ‘I need this particular type of bone allograft’ … or those types of things to help,’” he explains.

Elliott considers AlloSource to be a “producer,” not a manufacturer, but notes that the model has changed markedly over the years due to its many innovations. “We have historically always viewed ourselves as a tissue bank, but we’ve evolved over our 30 years into a real life-sciences company,” he says.

Spectrum AMT (short for Advanced Manufacturing Technologies) came to be in 1997 when Colorado Springs was trying on the “Silicon Mountain” nickname for size.

The company started off manufacturing a proprietary medical device, but soon pivoted to other markets as a contract manufacturer. “When that one single medical device didn’t really take off, they quickly converted to building electronic circuit boards and doing some assembly work,” says Jeff Gilbert, who took over as CEO when founder Jeff Riggs retired in early 2024. “They found their niche in the market with high-reliability circuit cards. We’ve got circuit cards on a bunch of the NASA missions, both on satellites and in space. We build a really critical component for the Mark 48 torpedo, which is used by the Navy, the Australian Navy and NATO.”

Spectrum AMT came full circle when Riggs sold a majority stake in the company to Ocutrx, a California-based medical device company, in 2023. Ocutrx had been working with Spectrum AMT on the development of an augmented reality (AR) headset for people with age-related macular degeneration (AMD). “The AMD headset is going to be ready for commercialization by the end of this year, so they’ll start to use some of our excess production capacity in 2025,” Gilbert says.

The acquisition was motivated by a need “to control our own destiny” with Ocutrx, he adds, but the focus remains on contract electronic manufacturing for customers in aerospace, defense and other industries.

Spectrum AMT also built components for NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which blasted off on a 2.2-billion-mile journey in 2023 to study asteroid cores.  “We built the part of the communication electronics for that,” Gilbert says. “It’s the first time they haven’t used RF signals to communicate. They went to a laser-based communication that uses, in layman’s terms, more of a Morse code signal.”

The company has more than doubled revenue to about $16 million since 2022, and more growth is on the way: Spectrum AMT is also expanding to serve an Italian satellite company, D-Orbit, as it ramps up production in the U.S. with a new facility and plans to hire 60 more employees.

Soon after retiring from the U.S. Air Force, CEO Matt Shieh co-founded Canopy Aerospace in Chicago in 2021. “As I was getting out, I still wanted to be a part of that mission and still contribute very critical capabilities that are needed today and in the future for the U.S.,” says Shieh.

The company is commercializing high-temperature materials developed by a team at NASA Ames Research Center in California. “Those materials were used on the Space Shuttle program, and a lot of those materials are still needed today for the commercial space industry,” says Shieh.

With funding from government agencies and private investors, Canopy is now looking to leverage this technology for thermal protection in aerospace and other industries via a Space Act Agreement with NASA. “We are developing advanced materials made for the 3D-printing process. These are advanced ceramics that don’t really exist today on the market for this manufacturing process. They were impossible to make previously, and so we are developing new materials and developing a software layer on top of our manufacturing that lets us optimize for manufacturing process efficiencies around design.”

Shieh says he sees the resulting 3D-printed components as a good fit for electric vehicles, semiconductor tooling, and other non-aerospace applications. “We’re making a lot of thermal protection systems and engaging with a few commercial partners,” he says.

Canopy moved to Colorado in 2023 for “the talent and exposure to different partnerships,” says Shieh, and currently operates out of a 20,000-square-foot facility in Littleton. “We’ve built out about half of it with industrial 3D printers that are able to make high-performance, highly engineered products that the market just hasn’t had access to before,” he says. “We do have a large traditional manufacturing line for thermal protection systems. We’re the only commercial company that can do this right now in the world.”

Shieh says he anticipates the 15-employee company will double its head count in 2025 as it pursues numerous government contracts. “In 2026, we’re working on flying a re-entry mission with a commercial partner,” he adds.

Art Castings of Colorado has been at the center of Loveland’s standout sculpture scene since Bob Zimmerman founded the company in 1972.

Zimmerman had been casting parts for tools in a small shop when an artist approached him to see if he’d cast a bronze sculpture. The rest is history: The 25,000-square-feet foundry now casts bronze and stainless steel sculptures for prominent artists all over the world.

 

General Manager Tony Workman joined the company in 1987 with a similar industrial background. He sees casting for artists as more interesting work. “No two pieces are the same. You have to think your way through each piece,” he says. “Even the same piece cast multiple times is not exactly the same.”

Despite the variation from casting to casting, the process has been relatively static for millennia: pouring molten metals into molds made from original sculptures. “They’ve been casting bronzes for 2,000 years, and there are always innovations, but basically, in a nutshell, it’s the same process they used way back then,” Workman says. “The ceramic shells are heated to 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit, and the molten bronze we pour into it is about 1,920 degrees. We also pour stainless steel, which is roughly 800 or 900 degrees hotter than the bronze.”

The portfolio spans sports legends and war heroes to animals and flights of artistic fancy. The largest one, The Irish Memorial by Glenda Goodacre, weighed upwards of 14,000 pounds.

The company also does smaller castings, and some of them are high-profile. “We do some famous football trophies that are handed out once a year in New York City, but we can’t tell anybody we cast them,” says Workman.

In early 2024, a thief stole a Jackie Robinson statue in Wichita by sawing it off at the ankles. By August, Art Castings had made a new one. “After the piece was stolen and vandalized, we still had the original mold, so it was not a big deal for us,” Workman says nonchalantly.

Workman sometimes sounds a little disillusioned with the business side of things, but his passion for the craft of casting is obvious. “There’s a lot of people that can pour metal,” he says. “There’s very few people that can pour really good metal.

“Our demand is a lot higher than we produce. We’re just trying to put out quality products. At times we’ve had the potential to have 100 employees, but we try to keep it between 30 and 35.”

In an industry that’s notorious for turnover, Art Casting of Colorado’s employees tend to stick around, Workman says. “We’re currently at 32 employees, and 16 have been here over 10 years, and there’s about 12 that have been here over 20 years, and we have a couple that have been here over 30 years.”

 

Pete Barszcz grew up in metro Denver, then went southwest to Fort Lewis College in Durango to study art and design.

He moved to Silverton in 1995 to pursue a life as an artist. “I was down in Durango, and I needed a little change,” he says. “I could work on my art up here, because I was doing a lot of painting and pencil work and doing actual art on canvas back then.”

Art led to sculpture, and sculpture led to a career in decorative hardware.  Barszcz started out designing cabinet hardware for Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based Liberty Hardware in 1999, but he grew disenchanted with the model and started Barz Decorative Hardware in 2005.

“Everything’s made in China, and it’s distributed through Target, Home Depot, the Great Indoors, all those big-box stores,” he says. “I bought all this equipment to make molds and just started making models and making molds. I probably started with about 50 to 60 designs. Now I’ve probably got 250 to 300.”

The Barz brand is now sold coast to coast through about 125 outlets. Beyond a wide range of cabinet pulls and knobs, the company makes plenty of hooks for coats and skis. “In Colorado and all across the West, it’s a pretty big seller,” Barszcz says.

The operation moved into a shop next to the Silverton Depot in 2013 where Barszcz has plied his trade ever since. He uses a spin caster to mold the hardware. “It spins at a certain RPM, and I have a pot where I have pewter melting at 600 to 625 degrees,” Barszcz says. “Then you take a ladle and pour it into the spin caster, and it pours into the mold while it’s spinning, and spins out your pieces.” The final steps involve cleaning and polishing the pieces before adding a patina or else sending them to a plating house for finishing.

Barszcz says he’s made “thousands and thousands” of units in the last 20 years. He mostly works by himself but has a few part-time people who come in when demand spikes.

Manufacturing in the heart of the San Juan Mountains “is pretty much like manufacturing anywhere else,” he adds. “UPS comes to the door every day. They deliver stuff and take stuff away. The scenery is a little better.”

Necessity can be the mother of invention, especially during a pandemic.

That was the case when Anna Zesbaugh launched her hard kombucha brand, Hooch Booch, in 2020.  “I was working in luxury hospitality, and I had gotten furloughed from my job because of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Zesbaugh says. “I’m a yoga teacher, and definitely in on the kombucha scene. There was a market opportunity here. There are no memorable options, and so I decided to lean in.”

The so-called “Denver Prohibition,” when city leaders decided to shut down liquor stores in 2020 but backpedaled after just two hours, inspired the name. “Hooch, like prohibition alcohol, and booch like kombucha,” Zesbaugh says.

For the uninitiated, kombucha is fermented tea that typically is very low alcohol and sold as non-alcoholic. Hard kombucha usually has 5 percent to 10 percent alcohol by volume.

Hooch Booch is brewed at a contract operation in Gypsum on Colorado’s Western Slope. The year-round catalog includes six varieties inspired by classic cocktails, like the lemony Bee’s Knees and the subtly tart Old Fashioned.

The brand is now sold at about 600 locations in four states, including Target, Total Wine and Whole Foods stores. Hooch Booch has grown to about 30 employees. “We pretty much continuously grow by 2X every single year, which is awesome,” Zesbaugh says.

A non-alcoholic electrolyte beverage launched in early 2024, Corpse Reviver has been a huge part of the growth. “We were attending so many beer festivals and yoga classes and things like that,” Zesbaugh says. “Some people were like, ‘I’m just not drinking right now,’ or ‘I don’t want that,’ so we decided to innovate into the non-alcoholic space.”

The company also opened the Blind Tiger Lounge in Denver’s River North (RiNo) Art District in August 2023. “Most breweries have a taproom,” Zesbaugh says. “People were asking for a physical location, and I have a hospitality background, so I was like, ‘Let’s do it. Let’s open a place.’”

The result: a snazzy speakeasy serving Hooch Booch and other craft beverages, as well as non-alcoholic “boneless cocktails” made with Corpse Reviver.

 Wendi Seger started her eponymous food brand out of necessity in 2020 when COVID-19 shuttered Locavores, her farm-to-table restaurant in Alamosa.

“We’re pretty isolated from the rest of the world, and our grocery supply really was drying up really quickly,” Seger says. “The restaurant supply chain is different than the grocery supply chains, so we asked if we could provide some of our staple items to the community.”

The answer was a resounding yes, and it snowballed into a small market with a selection of items from outside producers. Then that snowballed into manufacturing. “My secret dream was always to be a product creator,” Seger says. The pandemic “pushed me to just do the things that I’ve always wanted to do. I learned what people gravitated toward, and then I started doing them myself and created my own brand.”

Seger initially pickled cucumbers and made salsas in-house, but growth quickly necessitated a move to work with several co-packers across Colorado. North Farm Pickles and Great Sand Dunes Mild Salsa remain two of her top sellers.

The model has helped her develop better products, she notes. “When you start working with co-packers, they teach you how to make it more shelf-stable. A fresh salsa is a lot different than a jarred salsa. You have to learn that whole process.”

After getting out of the restaurant business in 2023, Seger moved Wendi’s Good Thing’s Market into a new facility at her family’s Bloomstead Farms near Del Norte in late 2024. The catalog now includes a wide range of foods, including pickled okra and jams, as well as candles and other lifestyle products. “I see myself as a lifestyle brand and with a mission to help people live a more purposeful, joyful life,” Seger says.

Co-founder and CEO Andrew Maxey worked in bicycle shops in the Midwest during high school and college. Bike frames served as an introduction to composites made with carbon fiber — and the waste associated with them. “It’s tens of thousands of tons of material, but it’s very expensive waste, and it’s very high-energy waste,” says Maxey. “There’s no reason to put all that energy into the product just to bury it back in the ground.”

Maxey started tinkering and invented a viable recycling method for carbon fiber. A quarter-liter, proof-of-concept reactor led to the founding of Vartega in 2014. “From that, I was able to demonstrate that we could recycle carbon fiber with our chemical recycling process,” Maxey says.

A 40-liter reactor was next, followed by a foray into product development. “Back in 2020, we realized we had to develop a format for our customers that made it easier for them to use our material or recycled carbon fiber,” Maxey says. “That actually led us to commercialize what we call our EasyFeed Bundle.”

It took off, and Vartega moved into a 50,000-square-foot facility with a 700-liter reactor on the north side of Denver in 2022. “We didn’t have enough capacity to meet the needs of our customers,” Maxey says. “We needed the upgrades; we’ve got almost 10 times the space and 10 times the capacity, and we just installed our second line.”

The new plant has the capacity to produce 2,000 tons of EasyFeed Bundles annually to be used in thermoplastics for automotive, sporting goods and other applications. The 25-employee Vartega will be hiring employees in 2025 for additional shifts, Maxey says.

Colorado’s location is central to its supply of manufacturing and end-of-life scrap, with a motherlode on the way: Maxey has his eye on the wind industry as a future source of carbon fiber to recycle.

“The blades coming down now have a lot of fiberglass in them,” Maxey says. “The blades will be coming down the next five to 25 years offer a lot more carbon fiber.”

He adds, “There’s a lot of material in blades. I haven’t actually done the math, but suffice it to say there’s a lot of captive supply in those turbine blades once they are decommissioned.”