Novo Nordisk feels at home in Johnston County

CLAYTON — Novo Nordisk, a maker of insulin and obesity drugs, likes calling Johnston County home.

So much so that the Danish company plans to build its third plant here.

“Novo Nordisk is investing $4.1 billion to build an entirely new state-of-the-art manufacturing facility here in Clayton,” Niels Laurbjerg Nielsen, a corporate vice president, said during a recent public announcement of the project. “This would be our largest facility in North Carolina, with 1.4 million square feet of new production space spanning 56 acres.”

That plant will fill and package the company’s current lineup of drugs, and it could one day do more, Nielsen said, looking to the company’s “next generation of products” that “have already been developed for tomorrow.”

Novo Nordisk launched in 1923 with a goal in mind, said Doug Langa, executive vice president of North American operations. “Researchers and doctors took on the mission of helping people living with diabetes to live longer and healthier lives,” he said.

And that team delivered, Langa said. “They succeeded in changing the diagnosis of diabetes from being a death sentence to being a chronic disease that can and should be treated,” he said.

A century later, many people benefit from Novo Nordisk mediations, Nielsen said. “Novo Nordisk is serving more than 41 million patients worldwide,” he said. “But we are far from reaching our goal, because as of today, 57 million people around the world live with diabetes, and those numbers are expected to grow to almost 643 million by 2030.”

Novo Nordisk has three plants in North Carolina — two on Powhatan Road near Clayton and one Durham. The company’s third Clayton plant will add 1,000 jobs to an N.C. workforce that already stands at 2,500.

Clayton was the first manufacturing site for Novo Nordisk in the United States, said Henrik Wulff, executive vice president of product supply, quality and IT. “For decades, we have partnered to foster a well-trained, dedicated and diverse local workforce in North Carolina,” he said in a news release. “In Clayton and across our global manufacturing sites, we are driven by one purpose — to deliver more for the millions of people living with chronic diseases, and this facility will help us achieve just that.”

Land clearing and foundation work have already begun on the new plant, which the company plans to bring online in phases from 2027 through 2029. Novo expects the project will employ some 2,000 workers at the height of construction.

“We have multiple design partners and multiple construction partners that we’ll be bringing on board,” said Jay Kuykendall, project vice president at Novo. “No one company can handle something this big, so we’ve divided the buildings up with different contractors and different trade partners.”

Green practices will be a big part of the plant’s blueprint, Kuykendall said. “We’ll be covering our rooftops with all solar panels,” he said in an interview. “So we’ll be generating a lot of electricity via solar energy. We’re going to do a lot of rainwater collection; we’ll be able to collect about 500,000 gallons of rainwater per year and reuse that in our utility system.”

The project means a lot to him personally, Kuykendall said. “I am from North Carolina, so it is super exciting that I can lead something that’s going to contribute something this big to the community,” he said.

Nielsen agreed that the company’s growth has been good for Johnston County and North Carolina. “It’s always nice to be part of a growing company,” he said. “And of course, we’re welcoming 1,000 new employees, which is amazing. “

“I am very proud for us to expand our footprint,” Nielsen added. “We want to reach more and more patients. That is why we continue investing here; we invest in the patients.”

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