For its more than 70 years of existence, Hitchiner Manufacturing has been proud to make New Hampshire its home and to participate as a committed and consistent corporate citizen. The past decade has been an especially exciting one as we are taking yet another step forward in our continuous quest for innovation and sustainable growth on the road ahead.

As a family-owned company that cherishes New Hampshire’s traditions of hardiness and self-reliance, we have maintained a steady if not spectacular trajectory of growth. And, we believe the future  can still be bright. 

In November 2019, the first group of 30 employees began working in a new 85,000-square-foot manufacturing building on the company’s Elm Street Campus in Milford. The building represents a $50 million capital investment that enhances our ability to serve customers in a variety of growing industries around the world. This facility houses equipment largely designed by our own engineering talent that will enable us to use our unique counter-gravity casting process to make larger products in greater quantities and with greater precision and flexibility of materials than ever before.

Staying innovative and nimble will be essential for our future, just as it has been crucial for our success throughout our existence. Hitchiner does not make a line of products; instead, what we offer is our mastery of a process of making precision parts custom-designed to fit customers’ demanding specifications. 

We open new markets by identifying industries with requirements that would benefit from our investment casting process and then work with customers to design a production method that meets their particular needs. But over the years, the industries we serve may change due to economic or technology changes, or their demand for a particular product may change as they adapt in their business. Thus, we remain on a constant search for new customers, and new methods to serve them.

While some other manufacturing industries in New England declined from the 1950s to today, Hitchiner has kept itself on a steady, sustainable course of growth by remaining flexible and innovative, enabling us to ride out the ups and downs of economic cycles.

Over the decades, we have made significant changes to our casting process to serve new markets. In the 1950s, we automated the casting process, enabling us to make precision parts of high durability in larger quantities. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, constant improvements to our processes enabled us to become more involved in auto parts and defense contracting. 

Several decades in the making, we made a more significant leap by developing and perfecting a counter-gravity casting process, unique in the industry, which turns the traditional casting process upside down. This process has several advantages in reducing production costs by increasing the number of parts that can be made in each casting, lessening waste and improving the durability of the parts.

In the past decade, we have been able to apply this process on a larger scale, enabling us to serve the aerospace and defense industries to make more complex parts. Our newly completed manufacturing facility increases our capacity and allows for a more refined casting process that reduces energy use and metal scrap waste, which is good for us, our customers, and the environment.

As we continue to grow, however, we are experiencing the same challenge that other manufacturers and employers in New England face: recruiting and retaining a high-quality workforce. And, as has been our tradition, we are always looking ahead at the future of the workforce in New Hampshire.

The importance of having the right people factors into many key decisions Hitchiner makes. Keeping the people with the expertise to develop and fine-tune production processes close to the production site itself is one of the main reasons our board decided to expand in New Hampshire, despite its high energy costs. 

Developing New Hampshire’s future workforce is something we have always believed is important and worth investing in. Through our active membership in statewide organizations such as the Business and Industry Association of New Hampshire and partnerships with local educators, we have promoted Science-Technology-Engineering-Math education and we helped create the New Hampshire Manufacturing Sector Partnership (NH SPI), which helps businesses in the manufacturing, hospitality, health care and information technology sectors assist workers with career advancement.

In our own business, we constantly communicate with our employees, and strive to improve training, offer relevant benefits, and redesign jobs to reduce turnover of workers and create paths for promotion for all levels of our workforce. 

We also have taken a fresh look at how to improve quality of life for our employees and control benefit costs by operating a free, on-site health clinic for employees and their families – which carries significant side benefits of reducing absenteeism and improving morale. 

The last 10 years have been perhaps the finest in our business. We have expanded our Milford plant, reduced our environmental footprint, grown our product offerings and moved into new markets to set us up for another exciting decade. Our innovative approaches to education outreach and our health care clinic demonstrate our commitment to be one of most modern, forward-looking companies in the Granite State.

Our accomplishments reflect our dedication to maintaining steady and sustainable growth in our business in good times and bad - and, as an employer and corporate citizen, constantly contribute to the quality of life in the state that we call our home.