Unither Pharmaceuticals Blow-Fill-Seal Addition, Rochester, New York

Hamilton Stern Construction added a two-story, 70,000-square-foot wing to Unither Pharmaceuticals’ plant outside Rochester, N.Y., while sterile production kept running next door. The $22 million blow-fill-seal addition took both Best Project in Manufacturing and an Excellence in Safety award in ENR’s 2026 East Best Projects, published Nov. 5, 2026.

Unither, a French-based contract manufacturer, bought the Jefferson Road facility in Henrietta in 2013. The site makes preservative-free sterile liquids in blow-fill-seal (BFS) format, plus oral and topical stick packs and bottled medicines. In 2024 the company announced a $106 million plan to modernize the 350,000-square-foot plant, expand warehousing and add up to 180 jobs, with Empire State Development offering up to $7 million in Excelsior Jobs Tax Credits.

Project Scope

The addition houses a full build-out of a highly automated BFS line and shell space for future expansion. Chemistry and microbiology labs take up the second floor. At grade there’s a two-bay loading dock, more warehouse space and dedicated shipping, receiving and staging areas.

Hixson Inc. was lead design firm and engineer, LaBella Associates was landscape architect and Hamilton Stern served as construction manager. The subcontractor roster includes Wolcott Contracting, Manning Squires Hennig, Ramar Steel, Building Innovation Group, Accurate Acoustical, Postler and Jaeckle, Crosby Brownlie, Schuler Haas and ES Systems.

Ground conditions set the early pace. Crews removed and replaced about 9,000 cubic yards of material and relocated numerous utilities that crossed the footprint, much of it during a Rochester winter. The addition also landed on top of an existing loading dock that handled critical deliveries and waste pickup, so the team moved dock operations in phases to keep trucks coming.

Why It Matters

A sterile pharmaceutical campus is one of the least forgiving places to build. This site carries approvals from the FDA, DEA, Health Canada and European, British and Brazilian regulators, and a dust or vibration problem on the wrong day costs far more than a schedule slip. The schedule was tight enough that masonry shafts went up while structural steel was being set, putting two trades in the same zones with real pinch-point and material-handling exposure.

The answer was organizational rather than technical. Unither’s own health and safety representatives were built into the project’s management structure, and ENR reports the work went in with no disruption to manufacturing.

BFS is how Unither makes its preservative-free sterile liquids, the single-dose format familiar from eye drops. A $22 million addition won’t make national headlines. But this is the scale at which most domestic pharma capacity really gets built: one line and one shell bay at a time, on a campus that can’t shut down.

Project Team & Details