December 27, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
LONGMONT, Colo. – Irvine, Calif.-based ChromaDex will open a new research and development facility in Colorado next week.ChromaDex leased a 10,000-square-foot facility and spent $1 million upgrading the site to meet its needs, Colorado’s BizWest reported last week. ChromaDex develops ingredients for dietary supplement, food and beverage, skin care, sports nutrition, and pharmaceutical products. The new facility will be used as part of the development process for the company’s in-house ingredients, ChromasDex’s founder Frank Jaksch Jr. told BizWest.
ChromaDex is not new to the Boulder area. The company maintains an analytics and testing lab there, where there are between 35 and 45 employees. Several of those employees will be relocating to the new Longmont facility, Boulder’s Daily Camera reported.
Derik Ward, ChromaDex’s director of engineering and project management, told BizWest that moving the company’s R&D workers to the new site gives the company “more room” to grow its analytics department. The new site will initially employ seven employees at the R&D site, but it has plans to double the number of hires over the next few years, Ward said.
The company chose Longmont, about 15 miles from Boulder, due to an incentive package of up to $16,000 offered by the Longmont city council, as well as “reasonable utility rates.” Part of the incentives agreement includes a plan to hire 10 new employees within 36 months. If ChromaDex does not hire those employees, “it will refund the rebate amount to the city in an amount equal to the percentage of jobs created below the committed 10 jobs,” BizWest said. The salaries for the jobs will be approximately $70,000.
Shares of ChromaDex are up this morning, trading at $2.97. The stock has risen since last week’s announcement of the expansion, when shares were trading at $2.50.
ChromaDex stock plunged in June after Bleeker Street Research posted an unflattering article that contained reportedly misleading allegations against the company on Seeking Alpha. The attack was viewed, particularly by ChromaDex, as an “attempt by a shortseller or shortsellers to profit from an immediate and precipitous decline in the company’s share price through the use of an opinion piece published anonymously and laden with misinformation, innuendo and the use of selective historical information.”
On June 30, Bleeker Street retracted the story, saying in part, “we believe that the statements were not supported and the premise of the article was allegedly factually inaccurate.”
Boulder County is home to 125 bioscience companies, such as Clovis Oncology . There are approximately 4,700 people employed by the Boulder life sciences industry.
