CLEVELAND — While Ohio residents do their best to stop the spread of the coronavirus, organizations inside and outside the state are already thinking about what it’s going to take to clean their facilities in the future.
Victory Innovations in headquartered in Minnesota, but founder Chris Gurreri lives in Northeast Ohio and started the company that now creates devices that help disinfect surfaces after they’ve already been cleaned.
“Today, everybody cleans,” said Gurreri. “But not many people disinfect.”
Victory Innovations has been working on an answer years before the coronavirus.
The handheld or backpack device sprays out a charged disinfectant helping it not only land on a surface but also evenly spread out on its surface, getting into hard to reach areas.
It reduces the time it takes for a cleaning crew or custodian to apply the disinfectant while also doing a more complete job.
“When I spray a dumbbell from the top, because the particles want to land, it will literally wrap all the way around the back of that dumbbell,” said Gurreri.
News 5 found a different but similar machine and disinfectant being used at Lakewood Catholic Academy when schools first shutdown and started sanitizing the building.
Delta Airlines released a video explaining that employees will be using Victory Innovation’s product to disinfect airplanes from now on.
Victory Innovations is now sold out of its products through June because of a seven-fold increase in orders. Gurreri says the company originally looked to sell to big cleaning companies and nursing home where cleaning and disinfecting was always a focus.
Now, he says schools, offices, churches, and transportation systems are all clamoring to buy their own devices.
“The idea of disinfecting is no longer optional,” said Gurreri. “It’s going to be a permanent change that people are making.”
