It’s been a little more than a year since Cargill and California-based Calysta announced the two companies would partner to bring an old corn mill on Presidents Island back to life with a brand new $120 million, state-of-the-art facility.

The result of that joint venture was NouriTech, a company created to commercially produce a new kind of sustainable fish feed known as FeedKind. And after spending the past eight months prepping the site, the fledgling company has gotten the green light from its board of directors to move forward with construction.

“At that board meeting we received approval to move ahead with Phase 1 of the project,” said Doug Sheldon, managing executive and chief operating officer of NouriTech. “We are looking to award an EPC (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) contract to finalize the detailed engineering that will be done here in the next six months. Upon the conclusion of that work, we will move into the field and start construction on the project.”

Sheldon said the 37-acre brownfield site has already been prepped for construction after demolishing some of Cargill’s existing on-site structures.

“If the timing is as we plan it to be, we will start civil activities about a year from now, perhaps sooner,” he said. “In the fall of 2018 we will start some of the civil preparation for Phase 1 of the plant. Material will be produced in the latter part of June of 2020.”

Once fully up and running, the NouriTech facility will be able to produce up to 200,000 metric tons of FeedKind in 20 separate fermenters the company refers to as “unit operators.”

Source: Memphis Daily News // Original Article