Kemin Industries Inc. is taking a similar approach in the design of its new research facility, which is now more than midway through the design process.

“The overall theme is really openness and flexibility,” said Alissa Jourdan, director of Kemin’s Discovery Research group, which develops the company’s newest research projects. “Our current building has individual rooms that our labs are in, whereas this will be very open and allow collaboration between our business units, which is what we want. It will allow a lot more innovation.”

Kemin’s headquarters campus at 2100 Maury St. is poised to double in size within the next five years, as Kemin unfolds a $30 million expansion plan it announced a year ago. The 50-year-old privately owned biosciences company develops and manufactures health and nutritional supplement ingredients for use in human and animal products, with seven overseas manufacturing facilities and sales in 60 countries. The two-story building will provide additional lab and office space for 60 employees.

“Certainly one of the reasons we’re building is that we have outgrown this building,” Jourdan said, referring to Kemin’s existing research center. “We’re very shoulder-to-shoulder in the lab. So quite a few people from this lab will move to the new building, but we will also fill that building. We have pretty aggressive plans for growth as a company, including here in Des Moines, and we’re including that in the process as we go.” The new headquarters building will enable Kemin to bring employees who are housed in leased spaces around Des Moines back onto the main campus.

The 44,000-square-foot research center will encompass six shared laboratories and three pilot-project laboratories, with 960 linear feet of laboratory “bench” space. The capital cost of the new research center will be “a big chunk” of the projected cost for the five-year, multi-building expansion project, she said. “It’s a sophisticated building; the other buildings won’t require as much infrastructure as the lab.”

SSOE Group, a multidisciplinary design firm based in Toledo, Ohio, is serving as the architect as well as handling the mechanical, civil, electricial and structural engineering for the project.

“They’ve got a very strong laboratory design resume,” said Matthew Madison, who was hired three months ago by Kemin to serve as construction project manager. Though the research center is the first phase of the expansion plan, the design process must consider how the building will connect with the new headquarters building that will be constructed three years from now, he said.

Madison noted that SSOE is using Autodesk Revit building design software, which assists the designers in working more effectively with the scientists who will use the building.

“From a design standpoint, it allows the end users who aren’t as familiar with reading construction prints to be able to clearly visualize the design as it is developed, which helps us to be more effective in modifying the design to better meet their needs,” he said. “From a construction standpoint, it will help the initial design to be more accurate.” The end result should be more accurate pricing when the project is bid and fewer change orders, he said.

Having additional space for developing new products is a vital objective of the expansion project, Jourdan said. The new research lab, just like Kemin’s current Des Moines laboratory, will have pilot space for developing new products, she said.

“The way the flow goes, there’s a new idea, research is done at the bench-scale level and then it goes to the pilot level,” she said. “That’s where you scale it up to a medium-sized product level before you actually build a manufacturing facility.”

With the additional building, “we will just have more pilot labs, and hopefully more products that we’re developing and scaling up and launching.”

Kemin already has plans for a second research wing that will be built parallel to the research building that’s now under construction.

“We have already roughly projected when we will outgrow the (new) space, and we don’t think it will be that much longer after we move in,” she said.