hen one door closed for Megan Militello, another opened.

After seeing a need for manufacturers in the state to connect and share resources, Militello co-founded the Alaska Manufacturing Association (AKMA) in 2025. The overall mission of AKMA is to link manufacturers across the state to enhance freight, workforce, infrastructure, supply chains, and market access.

“I don’t know how much people realize that manufacturing is everything. Everything is made; even agriculture, is manufacturing, right? We are producing something at scale to serve others,” Militello says. “VanderWeele Farm makes carrots, right? They have a whole system. They have equipment that they need to buy. They have bags that they need to buy. They have the different sales channels that they need to get into to survive as a business… We want to try to have the public support those businesses that are actually making things here in Alaska—because how do we recirculate our dollars within the state instead of just giving them to everybody out of the state?”

Militello moved to Alaska in 2019 and started her own granola company, Elevated Oats. That chapter of her life was four years of building a manufacturing business. She learned and saw firsthand the challenges Alaska manufacturers face when it came to importing goods up north.

“If you sell something out of Alaska, you are having to deal with the logistics of getting it out, and the cost of whatever you brought up, whatever you are making, and then whatever you are trying to get out to somewhere else,” Militello says. “We face a lot of the same challenges, and I think when I was going through that process, it seemed like everyone thought they were dealing with these problems on their own. We all were very siloed, and there wasn’t something bringing the people together to try to overcome and share those resources or knowledge together. Everybody was on their own, and we were all going to the same markets, and we were all doing the same things, but how could we figure it out together? I think throughout the whole process, I just learned that doing things together as a community is so much more powerful than trying to be in your own boat and on your own thing.”

After years of challenges, she and her business partner made the difficult decision to shut down Elevated Oats. Once Militello walked away, she was offered a position with the Alaska Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), part of a federally supported nationwide network. There is an MEP center in every US state which is funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, but Militello says the program requires a financial match.

“My position was grant funded, and it was all about supply chain optimization,” Militello says. “It was this new pilot program that they were running, so that more things could be made in Alaska. So, moving into that position really got me connected with other manufacturers, not just in the maker space or the food space, but in construction…. Logistics is the number one thing that people complain about all the time when it comes to Alaska, and not everybody understands these little tricks and things that you can do to try to make your costs less. How do we reduce the cost of shipping something up, but maybe it’s not a full container or whatever the case may be?”

Militello was in the role for a year and half, until the organization closed in June 2025 due to lack of funding. She came back together with her Elevated Oats business partner to establish an organization focused on manufacturers. She notes that manufacturers can still go to the Alaska Small Business Development Center, but manufacturing is so unique and deserves to have its own focus.

“In Alaska, we only have about 700 manufacturers, which is the smallest I think out of any state in the nation,” Militello says. “If you talk about just California, it is like 54,000 or something crazy. The amount of manufacturers in all the other states is huge compared to what we are facing here.”

AKMA hosts quarterly networking events to bring folks together and share resources, hosting workshops and roundtables that share the resources many businesses have spent years growing. The association has also organized listening tours for different policymakers to show barriers that Alaska manufacturers face daily.

AKMA has four different tiers for those interested in joining: Alaskan-Made, Alaskan-Designed, Alaskan-Powered, and Alaskan-Ally. Alaskan-Made is for businesses that make their product here in Alaska. Alaskan-Designed is for businesses that design products in state but manufacture elsewhere. The Alaskan-Powered tier is for organizations, suppliers, service providers, nonprofits, institutions, and individuals that support or enable Alaska manufacturing. Finally, the Alaskan-Ally tier is for businesses outside of the state that support or collaborate with in-state manufacturers.

“We want people to know that it is possible to manufacture here, especially those business owners that are smaller and trying to scale,” Mitello says. “I think that sometimes those business owners hit walls, and they think that it is not doable. We know that there are challenges when it comes to accessing capital or growing into different sales channels. But this is where I think if we come together and try to give you the information, give you the knowledge, so that you can shave some years off of it.”

PanAlaska is a member of AKMA, falling under the Alaskan-Made tier. It’s an Alaska manufacturer that specializes in expanded polystyrene insulation materials, as well as modular building components that serve both residential and commercial infrastructure markets. PanAlaska manufactures the ArcticLight Modular Structural System, which are building panels specially insulated for cold weather that connect to one another to make houses or commercial buildings.

Glenn Brady, one of PanAlaska’s partners, says that he developed the initial idea five years ago from a conversation with a friend about the Fairbanks community failing to deliver housing for the F-35 beddown at Eielson Air Force Base. He is also the president of NanuqX Industries, which integrates manufacturing solutions for Arctic infrastructure and national defense using PanAlaska’s ArcticLight Modular Structural System to build its parts, a “hand in glove sort of thing,” Brady says.

“Long story short, in that moment I realized that this failure was impacting mission, impacting national defense,” Brady says. “It really spoke to the problems underpinning our state and local economy. I wear other hats as well, not just engineering and construction. That is my background, and amongst that, manufacturing on the brewery and restaurant services side. So, I was really familiar with the economic headwinds. We are looking at our dwindling workforce because nobody can afford to live here. There is the out migration, a real difficulty in hiring and retaining employees, and hearing this across the board from all sorts of industries—bottom entry level, all the way up to high skilled professionals.”

Brady began talking to local builders and hearing what hurdles were getting in the way of building housing, from supply chain problems to the cost of raw materials. Brady began to develop the technology, patent and test it, and has since commercially deployed it across the state.

“We have been out trying to raise money to grow this, and it is what I call ‘deep pockets, short arms.’ There is a lot of money in the state, a lot of capacity, but a lot of risk adversity,” Brady says. “And understandably so, but at this juncture in where Alaska is and what we have coming, what is bearing down on us in terms of external challenges, we are dangerously far behind in our ability to do these things.

“I remember working on a power plant project years ago for a company out of San Francisco and was employed as an engineer, and [San Francisco] had just lost their symphony orchestra, and meanwhile, Fairbanks had two,” Brady continues. “Back when there was a Mercedes dealership here and a Nordstrom, and there were double shifting schools, and now all that has gone by the wayside. But the things that make Alaska what it is—the university system, the arts and culture, those are all things that build upon a high quality of life—and that we need to get back to.”

Currently, Brady says there is a complex deal being put together that would have PanAlaska manufacture and deploy a prototype arch structure on Eielson Air Force Base to use as an aircraft weather shelter.

“We will be able to park an F-35 or a helicopter in it and do the structural and thermal testing, then redeploy it to a remote airport next year,” Brady says. “That test program is underway and funded—it has been a lot of interesting inertia—like a lot of recognition that the state needs to build rapidly. And in support of defense and resource development, disaster response capacity. It’s like everything, everywhere, all at once.”

One technology from PanAlaska is the panelized building and structures, and the other is a technology developed by Brady’s former professor, Doug Goering, former dean of the UAF College of Engineering and Mines.

“[Goering] developed a technology using the same manufacturing tooling that we have for building the panels,” Brady says. “We are able to manufacture this technology, which is permafrost thaw stabilization, done more cheaply and with higher performance than current technologies. This is the puzzle of Western and North Slope, Alaska, with all the infrastructure melting into the thawing permafrost and destabilizing. This is a solution for that—that we can manufacture here… The potential for that is tremendous because it allows for massive reduction in gravel aggregate use for infrastructure construction on the North Slope. Gravel is hugely expensive. In Western Alaska, where they’re having to barge gravel in to do stuff, this reduces the need for gravel by 70 percent.”

Brady says that combined, PanAlaska and NanuqX Industries are a homegrown “one-two punch” on Arctic infrastructure technology.