Minus 85 °, -86 °, -87 °, -88 °… In Meyzieu, in the Lyon suburbs, tests are going well on the super-freezers before their shipment, in France, but also in England, Ireland, Belgium , Greece, Iceland, Asia and even Australia.
Froilabo, the only French manufacturer of these super-freezers capable of storing vaccines against Covid-19, had to step up the pace to meet an order book that is filling up like never before under the effect of the health crisis.
"The demand began to be felt from March with the pharmaceutical labs which began to search for a vaccine against Covid-19," explains Tony Grandménil, deputy general manager of this SME of 70 employees.
It has accelerated since November with the announcement of the release of vaccines and the launch of vaccination campaigns.
“A real challenge for this century-old company which began in 1918 with incubators for premature newborns and has reoriented itself in recent decades towards cold for hospitals and pharmaceutical laboratories.
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This specialization has been further strengthened since Froilabo joined the Hong Kong group Techcomp in 2009.
To the point that super-freezers intended for health today represent three quarters of the activity of the Lyon SME.
These large boxes, sold around 10,000 euros each, can contain 160,000 doses of vaccine for the standard version and 280,000 for the larger ones.
If the French government has announced that it has purchased about fifty of these products from PHCbi, a subsidiary of the Japanese giant Panasonic and 19 from the American Pfizer to keep vaccines against Covid-19, the little Frenchman provides several French university hospitals. like those of Paris, Lyon or Grenoble.
But also large laboratories such as Sanofi, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Biomérieux, the Pasteur Institute, Inserm… “We generate 50% of our turnover in France and 50% internationally, of which a significant portion is in Asia. , specifies Tony Grandménil.
We have increased our activity by almost 30% in 2020, but it is accelerating for the first half of 2021. ”
A hundred super-freezers per month
To cope with the pressure of demand, the Lyon SME had to strengthen its production capacities in record time by investing in new equipment, but also by carrying out around ten recruitments, in France as in Romania where Froilabo is partly of its production.
This is how the SME is now able to triple its production and bring out of its Meyzieu premises, around a hundred super-freezers per month.
A trend guaranteed for the next six months by vaccination campaigns, but that the SME imagines to continue in the long term.
"Research in the world should take over on vaccination," said Tony Grandménil, who is betting on the opening, in the wake of anti-Covid vaccines, of a new generation of treatments in the fields of immunology or cancer, which also requires ultra-low temperature storage.