History of AVEKA
Willie Hendrickson completed his PhD in 1978 and went to work at 3M Company where he managed a particle processing group. This included a research effort at the main 3M campus as well as a pilot particle processing plant in Woodbury. In 1994, his supervisor told him that 3M had decided to close the pilot plant as it was no longer a core facility that 3M wanted to maintain.
Willie presented his supervisor with a few scenarios for closing the pilot plant, but that wasn’t enough. His boss speculated that there might be someone interested in buying the lab and keeping it running. Apparently, 3M didn’t want to lose the processing capability of the pilot plant, but preferred the option of selling the plant to eliminate the hassle and liability of running and owning the facility. After consulting with his wife, Willie turned his entrepreneurial spirits on high and made a proposal to 3M.
The proposal was accepted. Willie found a bank loan and a few friends and bought $3 million worth of equipment from 3M for $150,000. With two 3M colleagues, he opened for business in May of 1994. The original and continuing premise of the company was and is to offer its customers the ability to do custom R&D for special projects and provide an avenue to scale up the processes to commercial levels. AVEKA would profit from the development and the continued toll processing.
Many of the jobs in the first few years came from 3M and 3M contacts, but word spread quickly about the small company that could do both R&D and production, and more and more customers found AVEKA through word of mouth and, later, through the Web.
As the company grew, AVEKA was asked to manufacture more material than could be handled at the Woodbury facility. During that time, many unused dairies were available in the Midwest and AVEKA was able to obtain one in Fredericksburg, Iowa. Unfortunately, the business didn’t appear as quickly as hoped and times were tough for the first couple of years. However, the direction of the business was changed to reflect the agricultural location and the manufacturing focus and a practical business model was developed that continues to this day.
A few years later, in 2001, a new opportunity in food contract manufacturing was identified. Again, to meet the needs of customers that required the cleanliness and quality levels for food processing, another Iowa dairy was purchased and established as Cresco Food Technologies in December of 2001. After going through the typical start up issues of all new facilities, Cresco has seen a large increase in customers during 2006 and 2007 and is a viable part of the AVEKA Group.
Since 2001, the AVEKA Group has continued its growth and diversification with the spin off of its proprietary metal nanoparticle technology in 2002 to Cima Nanotech (a venture capital funded company), with its investment in Vision Pharma, LLC (a pharmaceutical excipient contract manufacturing company) and with continued expansion at all three AVEKA Group facilities. The increase in engineers and production employees, floor space expansion, facility upgrades, new equipment, and technology growth has allowed the AVEKA Group to expand far beyond its beginning with just three employees.
From that beginning, there are now five companies and over one hundred and fifty employees that are part of the AVEKA Group and its associated companies. And all from a fortuitous deviation from 3M straight into the world of dust (“avikka” means deviate in Norwegian and dust in Hebrew).