France’s ARD: New premises and a new dynamic

In France, ARD is inaugurating its new premises, just a few hundred meters away, at the center of what has since become the biorefinery of Bazancourt-Pomacle. The new building, the consortium partners say, represents the ambitions of a team of over 90 people dedicated to creating value from crops through industrial processes.

A research and development company located at the heart of the regional biore- finery of Pomacle-Bazancourt, France, and backed by the cooperative players VIVESCIA and CRISTAL UNION, ARD has two main activities. The first is the scaling up of processes from the laboratory stage to industrial demonstration stage in the fields of biorefining, industrial biotechnologies, and green chemistry. ARD offers its services to start-ups and manufacturers, which benefit from the expertise developed by ARD over the last 20 years and its investments in laboratory equipment, pilots, and industrial demonstrations, and can thus speed up the time to market for products while optimising costs and investments.

ARD’s second activity is the maximisation of its own research projects’ value through the creation of subsidiaries that market and industrialise new products, such as Wheatoleo for detergent and emulsifying ingredients. ARD successfully developed processes that led to the creation of industrial facilities such as Chamtor, Cristanol and Soliance in Pomacle-Bazancourt.

A reputation acquired over the years

Over 20 years after its creation on the Pomacle site, near the Bazancourt sugar refinery, ARD is inaugurating its new premises, just a few hundred metres away, at the centre of what has since become the biorefinery of Bazancourt-Pomacle.

In the same spirit as ARD’s founders and the farmers that joined forces through their cooperatives, this new building (built by general contractor, Pingat) represents the ambitions of a team of over 90 people dedicated to creating value from crops through industrial processes. The basis of human and animal food, crops are also the development «substrate» for a wide range of molecules intended for markets in what we now call «bio-based chemistry».

Indisputable and international know-how

Since its creation in 1989, ARD has built up a wealth of knowledge that is widely recognised in the fields of plant fractionation and biorefining, industrial biotech- nologies, and plant chemistry. The creation of Wheatoleo and of Soliance – the latter having recently been acquired by Givaudan – are testimony to ARD’s capacity to develop industrial projects.

The product of farmers’ proactive and lasting ambition to be masters of their own destiny, ARD aims both to develop agriculture in the face of significant challenges (agroecology, etc.) and to help all companies – and start-ups in particular – bring innovative projects to frutition.

Over the last 10 years – and particularly since the creation of the Industries & Agroressources (IAR) competitiveness cluster, of which ARD is one of the founding members – the number of projects supported by ARD’s teams has been in constant progression. ARD’s customers include BioAmber, Amyris, and Global Bioener- gies, to name just three.

A platform for innovation that is now open

Since the French Ministry for Industry officially recognised ARD as an «open platform for innovation» in 2009, ARD has progressively established a reputation as a «scale-up facilitator» for the famous TRL scale, a method for measuring the technological maturity of a project that has been widely adopted in France and the rest of Europe. Indeed, the construction of the Biodémo platform in 2009, and the creation of an academic campus on site, enable it to provide a range and a level of services that cover every level of this scale.

A long-standing member of EuropaBio, ARD is part of the inner circle that was behind the creation of the European association BIC (Bio-Based Industries Consortium). Part of the Bio-Based Industries public-private partnership, as an open platform and thanks to its achievements and the move to its new offices, ARD is now emerging as one of the leading facilities for contributing to the development of the bioeconomy.

Contact

Pierre-Emmanuel de Laforcade
T. +33 (0)1 53 20 38 78 I M.
+33 (0)6 50 35 86 82 I
E. pierre-emmanuel.d@tmarkoagency.com