Adventure Medical Kits
Littleton, New Hampshire, 1989 — first-aid kits laid out by injury rather than by item, built in the same house as SOL, Counter Assault and the consumer QuikClot line.
Mayday Industries
Huntington Beach kit house with 1,400-plus preparedness items on the shelf, a start date its own pages disagree about, and a customer list we could not verify a single line of.
Mayday Industries describes itself as a manufacturer and wholesaler of disaster preparedness supplies, working from Huntington Beach, California, with over 1,400 items across emergency kits, food and water, first aid, lighting, sanitation and CERT gear. The verifiable part of that is the breadth and the wholesale model. The part everyone repeats — that this is a long-standing institutional and municipal supplier — is a claim we went looking for and could not source, so this page does not make it.
- 1,400+Unique disaster preparedness products Mayday says it carries
- 1990Establishment year on the about page; a 2006 release implies about 1992
- 31 yearsThe homepage's age counter — a 1990 figure that was last true in 2021
What we'd reach for
- Office and school emergency kitsThe multi-person kit lines the catalog is organized around. Contents are other companies' products, and the component makers are not named on the listings we read.
- Emergency food and water pouchesSold under a "U.S. Coast Guard Approved and Certified" heading. No approval number is published alongside it, which is the one piece of information that would let a buyer check the claim at its source.
- Custom logo kitsKits assembled and branded to order — the wholesale core of the business, and the part of it that is genuinely Mayday's own work.
The address is current and the catalog is real. Mayday’s about page gives 16152 Beach Blvd, Suite 117, Huntington Beach, CA 92647, describes the company as a “manufacturer and wholesaler that specializes in disaster preparedness supplies,” and claims “over 1,400 unique disaster preparedness products.” That last figure is the honest headline here: this is a business built on breadth, on being the place a reseller can buy every item in the bag from one invoice.
What a kit assembler is, and why it matters
A preparedness kit is not a product in the way a harness is a product. It is a bag containing other companies’ work: someone else’s water pouches, someone else’s flashlight, someone else’s gauze, someone else’s radio. An assembler’s address tells you where the bag was packed. It tells you nothing about where the contents were made, who tested them, or what they are rated for.
That is not a criticism of assembly — packing a coherent 72-hour kit is a skill, and a badly specified kit is worse than no kit. It is a statement about where the evidence lives. Every claim that could matter in an emergency belongs to a component manufacturer, and if that manufacturer isn’t named on the listing, the claim cannot be checked before the bag is opened. On Mayday’s listings, the component makers are generally not named.
The one place Mayday looks like a manufacturer rather than an aggregator is water: the homepage references a “Water Bottling Plant License” alongside its “U.S. Coast Guard Approved and Certified Food and Water Products” heading. That is a real regulatory distinction — and it is published without an approval number, so a buyer cannot look it up.
The date problem
Three of the company’s own artifacts point in different directions. The about page says “Established in 1990.” A 2006 press release on a wire service — company- supplied copy, not journalism — names John Tepel as founder and says he “began the business out his living room 14 years ago,” which points to roughly 1992, and places the operation in Westminster rather than Huntington Beach. The homepage’s own counter reads “31 Years in Business,” which is exactly what a 1990 start produces if you stopped counting in 2021.
None of that is disqualifying. All of it is why this page carries no founding year: where a figure isn’t published consistently, we don’t pick the flattering one.
The claim this page refuses to make
Mayday is widely described as a supplier to schools, municipalities and government agencies. We went looking for one verifiable contract, purchase order or agency listing this session, on Mayday’s own site and outside it, and found none. The 2006 wire release mentions government and Coast Guard work, but a promotional release from twenty years ago is not evidence of a current customer, and we are not going to launder it into one.
So the honest version: Mayday is an assembler and wholesaler whose customer base we could not verify. If institutional adoption matters to your decision, ask for references directly.
Where they fall down
The component list is the missing document. No published contents table naming makers, shelf lives and origins for the flagship kits. Compare a component manufacturer like North American Rescue, where the item and the maker are the same entity and the specification is published.
A regulator’s name without a regulator’s number. “U.S. Coast Guard Approved and Certified” is a checkable claim only if the approval number travels with it. Here it doesn’t.
The corporate picture is one-sided. Ready America lists Mayday Industries under “Our Brands” on its own about page. Mayday’s site names no parent, no group and no owner. Two companies in one wave, one relationship, one direction of acknowledgement — and no filing we could point at to settle what the relationship actually is.
On the documented record: a wide wholesale shelf, an unsettled corporate identity, and a reputation for institutional supply that nobody publishes the proof for.
More in Camp & carry
All brands →The nearest neighbors on the shelf — same categories first, same department after that.
Chinook Medical Gear
Founded in Durango, Colorado in 1990, now in Tulsa — a licensed drug wholesaler that builds custom medical kits, majority-owned since 2015 by the employee who bought it.
Emergency Zone
A 2007 Idaho family business that became a Utah kit house — and, by its own description, primarily a drop-shipper for other people's storefronts, which is the most useful thing it publishes about itself.
My Medic
North Salt Lake, Utah — the direct-to-consumer kit brand whose legal identity changed hands in January 2026, and whose own pages tell you which components came from where.