A Tamarac company in the pharmaceutical packaging business is laying off 88 of its workers and permanently closed its manufacturing plant, according to a filing with the state.
The layoffs at New Vision Pharmaceuticals were effective last Friday as was the shutdown of its manufacturing facility and headquarters 10200 NW 67th St., according to a notice filed with the workforce agency FloridaCommerce under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. The notice was submitted by a company executive this week.
“NVP closed the entire plant on February 9, 2024,” Manuel Jimenez, the human resources director, wrote in the filing. “At this time, 88 employees will be affected by this layoff, and the layoffs will be permanent.”
Positions on an accompanying layoff list ranged from the chief executive officer and chief financial officer to various managers, directors, engineers, supervisors, technicians and warehouse workers.
Under the federal WARN act, companies are required to tell state officials in advance about impending layoffs and plant closings. In his filing, Jimenez said the company does not believe the notice requirement applies to New Vision Pharmaceuticals “in that it has less than 100 employees.” But he said the company provided the notice “in an abundance of caution.”
The closed plant covers 165,000 square feet and produced 850 million doses annually, according to the company website. Until its shutdown, it was staffed “with teams of experts in the pharmaceutical and dietary supplement industries.”
Jimenez did not immediately respond to a voicemail message left at his office on Tuesday. A message left with the company reception desk also was not returned.
The company advised Tamarac’s economic development office of the closing last Friday, a city official said. The western Broward County city is home to more than 66,000 residents and more than 2,000 businesses, according to its website.
Served multiple industries
New Vision Pharmaceuticals is a U.S. Food and Drug Administration-registered contract development and manufacturing company that packaged liquid and semi-liquid products “in a breadth of industries,” according to a company mission statement. Those industries included “pharmaceutical, diagnostic reagent, dietary supplement and a multitude of other applications.”
According to the financial data based Pitchbook, the privately held firm was founded in 2012. At the start of 2018, it was acquired by the private equity firm Morgan Stanley Tactical Value Investing.
Advanced packaging technology
The company employed a “Blow-Fill-Seal” technology to manufacture premeasured, single-dose products. Through the technology, containers are “formed, filled and sealed in a continuous process without human intervention, within a sterile environment.”
In 2021, New Vision announced the availability of “single-use diagnostic reagents for use in antibody and antigen COVID-19 test kits.”
“When applied to test materials,” the company said in a statement, “the reagents help facilitate highly accurate results within minutes.”
“Given emerging, more transmissible COVID-19 variants, rapid and reliable testing is more critical than ever to public health and ending the pandemic,” CEO Alan Petro said in the statement. “Our reagents, which are safe and simple to handle, are used in test kits administered in both home and healthcare settings.”