Of the three potential defect categories, manufacturing defects are the easiest to identify, as the plaintiff need only demonstrate that the product was not manufactured as it was intended to be. If the manufacturing defect results caused injury, the plaintiff may prevail. This serves as both an encouragement and a punishment to manufacturers to assure that their products enter public commerce in a safe and defect-free manner.
Most manufacturing defects will be discovered to have been associated with a properly designed product that would not cause injury or death had it been properly produced. These include cases where there has been contamination due to improper tooling of the machinery used to produce the product, or where the product was manufactured properly but subject to external contamination (e.g. food contamination with bacteria).
