Eurofins Scientific puts down roots in Greater Des Moines

Eurofins Scientific Inc., one of Europe's fastest-growing companies, completes the  move of its North America headquarters from Memphis, Tenn., to Des Moines.

The new Des Moines headquarters will serve as the base for the company's food-testing  operations, as well as provide shared accounting, information technology and human  resources functions for all of its U.S. operations. Eurofins operates laboratories in six U.S.  cities, including a Des Moines facility at 3507 Delaware Ave. that employs 54 people.

The move into leased space is just an interim step for the company, which plans to build or  buy a headquarters complex in Greater Des Moines that will house up to 150 employees,  plus state-of-the-art testing laboratories.

Eurofins, based in Nantes, France chose Des Moines over Kalamazoo,  Mich., and Washington, D.C. because of the quality of its work force

In September, Eurofins was ranked by Standard & Poor's as No. 7 among the 300  fastest-growing mid-size companies in Europe. The publicly held company was founded in  1987 by Gilles Martin, who is the majority shareholder.

Eurofins has established a U.S. network of laboratories over the past 10 years through a  series of mergers and acquisitions of companies, among them Product Safety Labs in New  Jersey, GeneScan USA in New Orleans, Alpha Chemical and Biomedical Laboratories in  Petaluma, Calif., and Woodson-Tenent. Its most recent acquisition was in June, when it  purchased Focus Bio-Inova Inc., a Virginia-based pharmaceutical testing company.

November, 2006