The latest and largest addition to Ewing’s robust roster of tech companies is FMC Corporation, the multinational chemical company that has over its 129-year history made everything from anti-fungal chemicals to armored personnel carriers.
Now, at the two buildings of the company’s Ewing campus, about 195 scientists, engineers and technicians are inventing the next generation of agricultural products and food and pharmaceutical ingredients.
In one building, technology director Michael Sestrick oversees the BioPolymer division, which makes products derived from seaweed and wood. These products find their way into all kinds of food including ice cream, energy bars, chocolate milk, and even meat in the butcher’s section of the grocery store.
On the other side in the parking lot, in a large building with a greenhouse attached to the side, the agricultural products division invents insecticides and herbicides and fungicides under the leadership of Duncan Aust.
Both leaders said the company’s efforts were, in the long run, beneficial to the environment and to the health of individuals.
Although local organic farmers and local food advocates might argue that food is better without any man-made additions, Sestrick makes the case that using plant-derived additives for prepackaged products can help people access nutritious food they might not otherwise have.
“Not everybody in the world has access to organically grown vegetables and produce,” Sestrick sid. “If you don’t have access to that, where are you going to get your nutrition from?”
Sestrick said a good example of this is a market FMC is paying a great deal of attention to: China’s emerging middle class. Most Chinese families do not have a refrigerator, but UHT milk that stays good at room temperature is a viable option. FMC extracts carageenan from red seaweed that is added to this milk to prevent fat from separating in the milk.
“If you were a parent in China and you wanted to give your child milk, you might not be able to go down to the store and get it, but you could provide something if it was stable at room temperature,” Sestrick said. “Yes, a lot of it is prepackaged food for sure, but a lot of people need prepackaged food. A lot of people use it and it’s made our lives a lot more convenient.”
And while many local organic farmers eschew the use of pesticides, Innovation director Duncan Aust, who heads the agricultural division, points out that agricultural chemicals let farmers grow more food on less land.
“Rather than chopping down rainforest in the Amazon to plant more crops, we can improve the yields we are getting from existing farmland,” he said.
Delicious biopolymers
In one room at the biopolymer division sit rows of chocolate milk bottles with different formulations, some with brown streaks where chocolate particles have settled, others with uniform color. It’s the latter that FMC aims for. Smooth chocolate milk with no cocoa particles settling at the bottom is just one of FMC’s projects.
Other uses for seaweed extract include replicating the creamy taste of fat, without adding fat. Many fat-free or low-fat ice creams and salad dressings and the like include FMC carrageenan products or microcrystaline cellulose.
The Ewing campus has a kitchen-like lab where FMC scientists meet with food company clients to test new products. It has a gas range, mixers, and other gear that looks like it would be used more by chefs than scientists.
Next door is a small (by industrial standards anyway) ice cream machine where new ice cream products are created and tested. Ice cream taste testing is not always as great a job as it sounds.
“It’s not all fun and games,” Sestrick said.” “Some times we’re testing stuff that’s not so good. One of the things we’re working on is putting Omega-3 fatty acids into ice cream. some of the taste tests can be not so pleasant until we get that one right.”
FMC also makes products designed to improve the taste of meat. Many pieces of meat found in the grocery store are injected with brine to make them juicier, and some contain FMC products designed to reduce the amount of juice that leaks out of the meat.
The food laboratories are located on the second floor of the biopolymer building. The first floor is devoted to what to civilians is a little-recognized field of pharmaceuticals. FMC makes everything that is in a tablet or capsule that’s not the active ingredient.
In other words, FMC makes everything in a bottle of aspirin except the aspirin itself. Microcrystaline cellulose, made from wood, makes up the bulk of most white tablets. In a tablet-making machine, powder flows in and is then compressed in a die.
“It’s like making a snowball on a wet, snowy day,” Sestrick said.
Of course, it’s not as simple as it sounds. One lab is devoted to pharmacokinetics, which is the study of how drugs are absorbed into the body. The non-active ingredients of a pill, tablet or capsule can have a great effect on how rapidly a drug is digested. By manipulating the characteristics of the tablets and capsule coatings, FMC can cause a drug to be absorbed all at once or slowly released over a 24-hour period.
FMC helps pharmaceutical companies develop the non-active-ingredient parts of drugs as well as vitamins and nutritional supplements.
The lab where these products are developed is full of high tech equipment. There is a new electron microscope that looks like an oversized desktop computer. The version at the old FMC lab took up an entire room, Sestrick said. They also have a device that measures the properties of the non-Newtonian fluids that make up most medications.
Then there is a machine with eight glass tubs that, when filled with acid, simulate the environment of the human stomach, and allow scientists to measure how quickly tablets or capsules release drugs.
FMC may not make lifesaving drugs, but drugs would be useless without the products FMC makes.
“All sorts of drugs are made useful by the things that we sell,” Sestrick said.
Bugs and beans
FMC was founded in 1883 as the Bean Spray Pump Company and in 1928 changed its name to the Food Machine Company. It made tracked amphibious vehicles for the military during WWII and got into the chemical business in 1943. In 2000, it split into manufacturing company FMC Technologies, and chemical company FMC Corporation.
FMC moved its innovation center to Ewing two years ago from its old Princeton campus. At the Ewing campus, located in the Princeton South business park off Lower Ferry Road.
Both buildings are set up with open office plans to encourage employees to interact with one another and come up with new ideas. Cubicle walls are no taller than chest-height, to facilitate collaboration.
The agricultural side of the research lab has little in common with FMC’s 19th-century progenitor. It employs about 95 workers, among them analytical chemists, formulation scientists, biologists, toxicologists and support staff.
Most of them are working on developing new fungicides, herbicides and insecticide, targeted at menaces like soybean rust in Brazil and corn rootworm in the U.S.
In the labs, scientists create new formulations, apply them to test plants and pests, and see which are most effective. Safety testing is outsourced to other companies.
The development cycle for these products is long, and Aust said no products have been conceived, developed and sent to market from the Ewing lab, but that would likely change in several years.
One product invented in Ewing that may soon be available to consumers is a secret weapon against bedbugs.
Aust showed off a small plastic box designed to lure and capture bedbugs. The box emits bedbug pheromones to attract the pests, as well as carbon dioxide to simulate human breath. The sides of the device are rough, to allow easier climbing for the bedbugs. But when the pests reach the top, they slide into a bedbug death pit, a plastic trap with smooth sides, from which there is no escape. This monitor doesn’t eliminate a bedbug infestation, but warns of one.
“A few years ago, our scientists believed that there’s going to be an opportunity here, and since then, it’s exploded,” Aust said.
Sandra Shinn tends to plants in FMC’s greenhouse in its agricultural products division Jan. 17
