A lot of products are made in China these days — but not everything. This summer, shoppers might be surprised to find that the “Kidnic,” a durable plastic, fold-up kids’ picnic table on sale at Walmart.com, Kmart, Sears, Costco and other stores across the country, was designed, manufactured and assembled right here in Cache Valley.

Silicone Plastics in Millville, the company behind the Kidnic, got its start producing plastic and silicone milking inflations, the part of a milking machine that attaches to a cow’s udder. Silicone Plastics controller Brett Hadfield said while most milking inflations are lined with rubber, the Silicone brush found on the inside of Silicone Plastics’ inflations is much better for the cows. Now, 30 years later, the company still sells its trademark milking products, but has expanded to produce plastic parts for the aerospace, food and beverage, exercise equipment and veterinary industries, in addition to the now widely available Kidnic picnic tables.

“There’s plastic in (almost) everything,” Hadfield said. “We basically cover almost every industry.”

Hadfield said the majority of parts produced at Silicone Plastics are made for local companies in northern Utah or for companies that demand a high level of precision, such as the aerospace and medical industries.

“In airplanes, if you don’t have it the exact dimension, (the part) is rejected right off the bat,” Hadfield said. That is even more true of parts that are space-bound, he said. “People can die if it’s even a little bit off. The weight of it has to be exact, the dimensions, the shapes, everything has to be exact. So there’s zero tolerance there.”

Hadfield said because of the cost of overseas shipping, manufacturing parts in China is only profitable in bulk, and only if the company isn’t as concerned with getting a product that meets their specifications exactly.

“If it gets here, and it’s a little bit off, and you decide to reject it and have them start over again, then you’ve got to have them start all over, and then they’ve got to ship it another however many weeks, or you’ve got to pay the air freight to get it over here quickly,” Hadfield said. “So if you’re ordering from China, you have to be willing to accept some minor flaws. We’ve found a niche in stuff that can’t have any mistakes, basically.”

Silicone Plastics uses a process called injection molding — where the plastic is liquefied, injected into a metal mold, and cooled — to produce plastic parts. Although owner Steve Miller said the company has its own machine shop to build the metal molds in-house, Hadfield said a mold the size of a cinderblock could cost up to $75,000 to produce.

The molds can get heavy. Hadfield said the molds for the biggest of the company’s 12 plastic injection machines “would turn over a forklift.” To move the molds to where they need to go, workers use a suspension crane that spans the length of the ceiling and runs on a track down the length of the 25,000-square-foot warehouse.

“So you’re not going to make a mold for one part,” Hadfield said. “Most of our customers are dealing in thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of parts.”

The raw plastic used by Silicone Plastics comes in small pebble form, like a giant box of plastic potato pearls. When the molding machine is running, the tiny plastic beads are sucked up through a hose and melted down in a metal hopper above the mold. As the plastic melts, Hadfield said the machine uses jets of hot water to heat up the metal mold as fast as possible, then steadily injects the plastic into it.

Once all of the nooks and crannies of the mold are filled with liquid plastic, the machine switches to jets of cold water, Hadfield said,  to cool the mold as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. Once the plastic is cooled and hardened completely, the mold opens, and a newly formed plastic part is dumped onto a conveyer belt, where it is picked up and inspected by a machine operator. The raw edges are cut and filed off, and extra scraps are tossed into a bin to be shredded and recycled into a new batch of raw plastic.

Hadfield said the melting temperature, the speed of the plastic being injected and the amount of cooling time all are factors in how the part will turn out.

“It’s just like food, you can overcook it, or you can undercook it, and it will mess with the parts,” Hadfield said. “Ultimately, you want the exact same temperature every time, as it goes into the mold. If it’s different, plastics will shrink or expand, based on what the temperature is when it melts.”

If the temperature is too hot, the plastic could become brittle and crack, Hadfield said, but if it’s not hot enough, the plastic may not flow all the way to the edge of the mold, and the part will come out stunted. And he said the trick is getting the machine to do all of this as quickly as possible, so the process can be cost-effective, producing as many parts as possible in the shortest amount of time.

Miller said getting the right temperature, pressure, amounts and speed for each part all comes down to the machine processors, who determine all of the machine settings for each part before it’s produced en masse.

“The processor is really an engineer,” Miller said. “He is the guy that puts the mold in and then he sets it up, and he dials it in to where, if we’re making this part, it’s putting exactly the right amount of plastic in, there’s the right pressures on the machine, he’s getting it to run just as fast as it can go and produce perfect parts. And that’s a real skill, it’s not something that you or I could go out there and just do.”

Miller said at least one of the company’s four processors is on duty at all times during the 24 hours a day, five days a week that the machines at Silicone Plastics are running and producing parts.

Since Miller and two other partners bought Silicone Plastics, then Silicone Products, in 1991, and in the 15 years since he bought out the other partners and became the sole owner of the company, Miller said the company’s size and profitability has quadrupled. In 30 years, the company has gone from three injection machines to 12, 5,000 square feet to 25,000 and now employs close to 65 people. In addition to the Kidnic, Miller said he and a subsidiary group of innovators, MedSmart, are constantly looking for new products to develop and new ways to innovate and expand.

“It’s not just a matter of somebody coming to us and saying, ‘Hey I’ve got a part, I want you to make it,’ but we take a proactive approach in that hey, we’ve got a great facility here, we’ve got our own tool shop, we’ve got the greatest processors in the world, I believe. We ought to be taking advantage of what we have.”

That’s exactly what Miller is doing with the Kidnic, a product he patented 10 years ago, and which has gained popularity with major retailers in the last year and a half. Hadfield said the company sold close to 20,000 of the tables for the last six months of last year.

Impressive for a little table that weighs less than 18 pounds, folds up and can easily be carried by one person. Almost as impressive as the 600 pounds of weight the table is designed to hold, or the fact that Hadfield can stand on it without the table so much as buckling. But the Kidnic is only the beginning. MedSmart already has a new product for veterinarians on the market, produced and packaged at Silicone ice tray Plastics’ plant in Millville, and more innovations in the works.

“That’s half the fun in this kind of business, is creating the product,” Miller said. “That’s where I get my enjoyment, is saying ‘Ok, what can we build?’ ‘How can we do this?’ and ‘How can we get it to market?’ and take it through the steps. That’s the fun of it.”