P&> is the biggest U.S. maker of toilet paper. Its factory in Albany, Ga., is one of six that make the product.
Photo: P&>Almost every day an employee at Procter & Gamble Co. ’s plant in Albany, Ga., a town with one of the nation’s highest rates of coronavirus, learns that someone close has become seriously ill or died of Covid-19.
There is little time for consolation between co-workers. They are all racing to churn out one of the most in-demand products in America: toilet paper.
“It’s a lot quieter here than it used to be,” said John Patterson, a 16-year veteran of the plant, which makes Charmin toilet paper alongside Bounty paper towels. Workers, who must stay 6 feet apart, console one another over headsets and on video calls.
P&G, which produces household staples from Tide detergent to Pampers diapers, is the biggest U.S. maker of toilet paper with close to 30% of the market. The sprawling Albany factory, one of six that make toilet paper, is P&G’s second-largest U.S. plant. It makes products that generate roughly $1.3 billion in annual sales, according to the Georgia Manufacturing Alliance.
The factory has ramped up production by 20% of both toilet paper and paper towels, even as it revamps its operations to keep its roughly 600 workers healthy. Among other measures, it has instituted pre-shift temperature checks and staggered start times. P&G declined to comment on whether employees have tested positive.
The plant sits in a midsize town of 75,000 people ravaged by the new coronavirus. More than 1,020 people have tested positive in Dougherty County, which includes Albany, and 62 have died as of Thursday afternoon. More people have died in the county than in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta and has a population more than 10 times larger.
Health officials trace the spread of coronavirus in Albany to a late-February funeral that drew more than 100 mourners, including a man who later died of Covid-19.
In mid-March, Albany Mayor Bo Dorough received word from county health officials that a few residents had tested positive for coronavirus. Officials thought the cases were isolated instances. “We thought it was an anomaly,” Mr. Dorough said. “But after those three deaths, things just started to cascade downward and it hasn’t stopped since.”
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The community and the factory have been through rough stretches. Albany has among the state’s highest rates of crime and poverty. In 2018, a hurricane wiped out power for days to thousands in the community. A year before that, a tornado leveled the warehouse at the P&G complex.
Around the same time Mr. Dorough was learning of the first deaths in his town, executives at P&G’s Cincinnati headquarters were strategizing about how to ramp up production. The company had already mobilized safety plans in the U.S. that it had previously put in place in China, the company’s second-largest market.
“I started to realize, this isn’t going to skip over us,” said Rick McLeod, who oversees product supply for P&G’s family care unit, which includes toilet paper. “There were cues that this is going to be a big deal. Then the floodgates opened and everyone realized the seriousness.”
The state of Georgia and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security consider the plant an essential business, so it has remained open as offices, shops and restaurants close throughout the rest of the state.
Demand for toilet paper shot up in the outbreak’s initial weeks, doubling in the second week of March, according to Nielsen. Before the surge, Americans spent roughly $9 billion a year on toilet paper. The internet flooded with memes and jokes about toilet-tissue scarcity, as well as tales of serious panic. P&G added a prerecorded message to Charmin’s toll-free line specifically for people hunting for toilet paper.
While Americans aren’t using more toilet paper amid the pandemic, they are going through substantially more at home. The thin, scratchy tissue found in office bathrooms and public restrooms is different enough that it is generally built at separate plants—with different supply chains—and can’t be redirected to store shelves overnight, said analyst Jonathan Rager of Fastmarkets RISI, an analytics firm specialized in the pulp and paper industry.
Making toilet paper in bulk requires a massive machine, a four-story-tall collection of intricately pieced-together parts, which costs billions of dollars and takes months to build.
Bathroom tissue begins with wood chips that are turned into pulp. The machinery cleans the pulp and feeds it through massive rollers that soak out any water. The pulp is then chemically whitened and then spread on a screen and put through a hot dryer, emerging as a delicate sheet of paper that gets rotated into a spool. A single spool can hold close to 50 miles of paper, which is then embossed both for aesthetics and to thicken the sheets.
A separate machine constructs cardboard into tubes roughly five-feet long. Two sheets of the finished paper are combined to make two-ply tissue, which is then wrapped around the cardboard tubes. A machine seals the roll with a light glue and then a circular saw cuts the long roll into bathroom-sized rolls that are packaged and loaded for delivery.
A big toilet paper operation could churn out a few million individual paper rolls a day, with that number varying significantly based on how many lines the factory devotes to toilet paper and the type and size of each roll, said Mr. Rager of Fastmarkets.
Quickly changing over a line or adding production at another factory wasn’t an option for P&G. But in Albany, P&G had an idled piece of equipment that, if put to use, could increase volume.
Setting up the equipment to help make the current product, and staffing it with workers trained to use it, would typically take months for Albany’s team of 10 technicians. So P&G sent a half-dozen engineers from other plants to help. The equipment was operational within two weeks, but the company had another problem. The engineers’ return flights had been canceled as airlines shut down amid the virus’s spread.
P&G CEO David Taylor, whose early career included a three-year stint in the 1980s as an operations manager of the Albany factory, directed a corporate jet to be sent to Georgia to retrieve the workers and take them home to Missouri and Pennsylvania.
Mr. McLeod, the P&G executive, also started his career at the Albany plant and lived there nearly a decade. His voice cracked as he talked about a retired technician, in her late 60s, whom he supervised in his early days who died of Covid-19, along with her daughter, who was in her early 40s. Earlier that day, he learned that an Albany employee lost their father.
“The more we can serve our consumers the better it is for everyone,” he said. “If they can just see some product in the store, it will help. There’s a sense of pride of being able to deliver that thing that’s so needed right now.”
Increasing production while keeping workers safe is a challenge for many U.S. employers, from meatpackers to factories making hospital ventilators. P&G has started producing face masks and hand sanitizer for its employees, as well as for medical workers.
Overtime is eschewed because putting workers on an extra shift with a different crew exposes more people should someone become infected. If a worker becomes ill, their entire team goes into quarantine.
P&G, at all its factories including Albany, checks workers’ temperatures at the start of their shifts. Start times and lunch breaks are staggered to avoid lines at the doors or people sitting close on breaks. The cafeteria has no salad bar or open food, just prepackaged options. Team meetings are generally held over video, even if everyone is at the plant.
Mr. Patterson, the P&G plant veteran, said the hardest thing is having to maintain distance from friends and family who are struggling.
“In other times we could be there to console folks in their time of need, really display that Southern hospitality,” he said, recalling the aftermath of the hurricane and tornado that hit Albany. His wife, who is a furloughed nurse, is teaching their five children at home since schools shut down.
Work, he said, is a consolation. “We’ve been able to deliver more than I’ve ever seen us do before,” he said. “Please let folks know that Charmin is on the way.”
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Write to Sharon Terlep at sharon.terlep@wsj.com
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