A $132 million manufacturing campus — where companies will transform crops into industrial chemicals otherwise made with petroleum and often sourced from overseas — is coming to Maple Grove.
The demonstration-scale facility will be the first and flagship location for nonprofit BioMADE, which aims to build a national network of plants to bridge the gap between prototype and production, kick-starting the country’s bio-industrial economy.
“What we really want to see is companies come use this facility, prove out their technology and develop a customer base,” said BioMADE CEO Doug Friedman. “Then, best-case scenario, a company decides to build its commercial-scale facility somewhere nearby.”
The state of Minnesota is kicking in $50 million to pay for the Maple Grove plant; the Department of Defense will cover the rest.
BioMADE, a public-private partnership headquartered in both the Twin Cities and the San Francisco Bay Area, formed in 2021 and has spent years looking for a site for its Minnesota facility.
The group will outfit an existing 122,000-square-foot building near Hwy. 169 and Elm Creek Boulevard with massive fermentation tanks and other equipment companies will need to test their products and processes.
The BioMADE facility will be just east of Maple Grove’s sprawling Minnesota Science and Technology Center, where Boston Scientific is building a $170 million office and R&D center. The million-square-foot development has plenty of room for more businesses, and BioMADE could provide a pipeline for future tenants.
BioMADE, which counts companies like Cargill and Lockheed Martin among its members, formed to build out the kind of experimental capacity the biotech industry typically doesn’t make for itself.
