Originally built in the 1990s to ferment amino acids for animal feed, Fermas has since diversified its 23 fermentation tanks and reconfigurable downstream processing into biosurfactants, pharmaceutical ingredients, feed supplements, biopolymers and other specialty chemicals, a breadth that reflects decades of accumulated institutional knowledge about which chemicals microbes can be engineered to produce profitably. Its flagship product, rhamnolipid biosurfactants made from a genetically engineered Pseudomonas putida strain fed on local corn sugar, reached commercial scale in 2024 and is used by Unilever as a more sustainable surfactant alternative in household products sold across multiple continents.

Evonik is now repeating this scale-up model for contract-manufactured pharmaceutical ingredients, backed by a $94 million investment announced in April 2026, even as the company cuts 6,000 jobs globally, a contrast that underscores how selectively the company is allocating capital toward sites it considers strategically differentiated rather than investing uniformly across its global footprint. Regional officials see the site, powered largely by Slovakia's nuclear and renewable electricity mix, as a seed for a broader biotech cluster, having attracted EU grants and partnerships with local universities including the Slovak University of Technology.

For chemical companies weighing whether fermentation routes can genuinely compete with established petrochemical synthesis at commercial scale, Fermas offers a rare data point suggesting the answer can be yes, provided a company is willing to invest the years of process development and downstream engineering the site's history illustrates, rather than expecting fermentation to substitute for existing chemistry on a like-for-like cost basis from day one.

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