NEW BREMEN – Brookside Laboratories will almost double its space when its $1.8 million addition is completed next year in New Bremen.
The addition will allow Brookside Labs to expand its current services and add more services, President and CEO Luke Baker said.
“We’re rapidly growing, and there’s a lot of opportunities out there,” he said at a ceremonial groundbreaking Monday morning. “To capitalize on those future opportunities we need this space.”
Brookside Labs was founded approximately 70 years ago in New Knoxville. In 2012 it built a 37,500 square foot facility at Bunker Hill Industrial Park on the west side of New Bremen and moved out of New Knoxville.
The new addition, which Brookside Labs hopes will be finished in the spring of 2021, will add 36,600 square feet of space.
“This is a continuation of what got started in an antiquated building in New Knoxville,” Peter Maybach, chairmen of the Brookside board of directors, said.
An addition of 30,000 square feet to the back of the facility in New Bremen will include new laboratories while a 6,600 square foot addition to the north end of the current building will house new offices and conference rooms.
“We used to be this little company,” Baker said. “Now we’re kind of growing up and becoming an adult, I feel like. So we finally figured out what we want to do, and we’re actually becoming it.”
The company offers numerous services including agriculture analysis, environmental testing, soil analysis, consulting services, lawn and garden services, and university and government research.
“We do a lot of education and training around agriculture and farming and production,” Baker said.
With the additional space, Baker would like to see Brookside Labs get into ag data processing, making seeding prescriptions, doing zone creation in fields for soil testing and studying microclimates.
“We’ll be able to do some more experimentation and research around some newer methods and emerging technologies in soil testing and plant and tissue analysis,” he said.
“Some of it’s kind of just a vision board at this time, but we have a lot of new things that we hope to add in the near future.”
As part of its expansion, Brookside Labs hopes to add two or three new employees in the near future to its team of 37. Once the addition is completed next year, Baker would like to add 10 or more employees.
“You see so many people struggling,” he said. “The fact that we’ve been blessed to be in the position that we are to be able to do this and be talking about adding new employees and new services, we’re just truly blessed to be in that position.”
Also when the addition is completed, Brookside Labs will spend approximately $500,000 to reconfigure part of its current facility.
For more information about Brookside Laboratories, visit www.blinc.com or call 419-977-2766.
