Three-time Idaho Global Entrepreneurial Mission (IGEM) program grant industry partner, Hempitecture, recently celebrated an important milestone — the grand opening of its new state-of-the-art, first-of-its-kind manufacturing facility.
In February 2023, Hempitecture held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to unveil their new 33,000-square-foot facility located in Jerome — kicking off the production of their flagship product, HempWool.
Hempitecture manufactures plant-based building materials, utilizing the husk of hemp stalks, to create building products such as HempWool.
The new facility will run on renewable energy and produce a wide range of bio-based non-woven products. These will be used across multiple industries and play an integral role in the supply chain of hemp and bio-insulation products.
Hempitecture’s new facility successfully started the manufacturing line which marks the first-time bio-insulation products have been used in the U.S.
For the past three years, Hempitecture has continued to partner with the University of Idaho (UI) through the IGEM grant program to conduct testing on their HempWool products. The IGEM-Commerce grant program funds research initiatives where university investigators and private sector business experts partner together to bring viable technologies to market. IGEM-Commerce commercialization grants are a powerful economic resource.
Since receiving the initial grant award of $206,624 to test fire retardancy and thermal insulation of the product, UI has received two additional supplemental awards of $106,175 and $100,141 to continue research.
“We are really thankful for Idaho Commerce and its support,” Hempitecture founder Mattie Mead said. “We get to continue our research into the future, which is exciting because that affords us the opportunity to take this research and bring it to the industrial real-world full-scale level. It has been a great year of working with the team and I feel like we are actually picking up momentum and inertia moving forward.”
Learn more about the IGEM Program here.