Freudenberg Medical Breaks Ground on Second Costa Rica Production Facility

Global medical device and biopharma contract designer and manufacturer Freudenberg Medical broke ground on a second manufacturing site in Coyol, Costa Rica. The $25-million investment will quadruple manufacturing capacity and lead to the creation of 600 new jobs.

Operational in the beginning of 2025, Freudenberg Medical’s new facility will be dedicated to the assembly of high-volume, minimally invasive catheters for electrophysiology, vascular and structural heart therapies and other medical devices that require high-precision manual assembly.

In the first phase, the new facility will cover 50,000 square feet and house three ISO 7 clean rooms. Within three years of opening, a further 50,000 square feet will be added, quadrupling Freudenberg Medical’s total footprint in Costa Rica.

The new facility will be close to the company’s existing 30,000-square-feet manufacturing facility in the Coyol Free Zone. During 2025, that existing facility will become Freudenberg Medical’s specialized Costa Rica site for primary processing technologies, including injection molding and extrusion of thermoplastics for medical applications, with assembly operations moved to the new facility. Over that same time frame, employees will triple from 300 to 900. The new facility will use a company-owned solar power plant to generate the energy needed to operate the site, with the company working toward its goal of being climate neutral by 2045.

A Freudenberg spokesperson told Plastics Technology that the company added a second clean room to its existing facility in 2023. Now the company is planning to install around 10 new injection molding machines, ranging in clamp force between 110 and 350 tons, over the next 3 years.