BRUNSWICK

It’s hard to tell just what goes on inside the 79,000-square-foot Mölnlycke facility at Brunswick Landing from the outside. Pronounced Moln-lik-ah, the Swedish company’s manufacturing facility is what Site Director Mark Dignum calls, “probably the most advanced wound care manufacturing facility anywhere in the world.”

By wound care, it’s something Dignum jokingly calls “fancy Band Aids” designed to take care of the “gooey, horrible wounds.”

He’s probably correct too, considering the $50 million custom facility is part of an industry with factories in 17 countries employing about 7,500 employees with a turnover in excess of $3 billion a year and plans to double in size by 2020.

Mölnlycke began with the purchase of Rynel in Wiscasset, who manufactures one of the components crucial to their dressings. The Wiscasset facility also makes skin grafts made of pig tissue.

“At that point, it made sense to acquire the business and secure it because making the medical grade foam that goes into our products — there are not too many people who can do that,” Dignum said.

When it came time to expand their presence in the U.S., Mölnlycke looked first to Wiscasset for expansion, as it was close to Rynel. Then, they discovered the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority, which was able to give them a good deal on a parcel of land where an old Navy warehouse stood.

Last year, Mölnlycke purchased Sundown Solutions in Indianapolis, Indiana, and from there, Dignum said, their growth in the U.S. continues to expand.

“We’ve got approximately 70 employees now, we’re going through some significant growth. We’ll have 100 by the end of this year. We’re operating two shifts on our main production lines and on our component machines, we’re already three shifts and that will continue to grow,” Dignum said.

Dignum said they are about to introduce two brand-new products and the facility has the capacity to manufacture around the clock, depending on the product mix, up to 100 million dressings a year.

“To give you a flavor for where we’re at, in 2014, we did 8 million dressings — it was our startup year, we only had production line. Last year, we did 18 million dressings. This year, we’ll do 30 million dressings as we continue to expand,” Dignum said.

The biggest hindrance to growth, according to Dignum, is the workforce — or rather, lack thereof.

Dignum said Maine needs to stop shipping out it’s young people. With nearby competition from Wayfair and other Brunswick Landing success stories, even an attractive $20 an hour to start isn’t creating a line outside Mölnlycke door.

Dignum said he’s looking for people with basic math competencies for the high tech work floor, but he also wants people who are always thinking and willing to share with him, ways to constantly improve the workplace.

Improvements may be hard to find in the mostly automated work floor where relatively few workers, donning gowns and booties, keep feeding the machines that make endless wound dressings.

It’s unlike most any other manufacturing space. The super-clean environment is pressurized. Air flow is carefully regulated and monitored, with filtered air exchanged in the entire room 10 times an hour.

The multi-million-dollar machinery runs nonstop, with very little waste produced. Even the thousands of perforations on bandage foam is created with sound waves, instead of “poking holes” which would leave debris.

One of the things Dignum said sets Mölnlycke apart is the clinical evidence gathered proving their products work.

One surprising proven use, Dignum said, is the virtual elimination of pressure ulcers when used properly. This is something that really gave Mölnlycke a foothold in the U.S., where insurance companies refused to pay for “bed sores” occurring in the hospital setting.

Hospitals were faced with the choice of treating a $10,000 pressure ulcer out of pocket or applying a $10 Mölnlycke dressing.