Braun Intertec

Braun Intertec is an employee-owned engineering, testing and environmental consulting firm headquartered in Bloomington, Minn. Its work sits underneath most construction projects: geotechnical borings and foundation recommendations, environmental site assessments, construction materials testing, special inspections and building envelope testing. It also does lab testing for aerospace clients. Its office list runs from Minnesota and North Dakota through Iowa to Texas and Alabama, including a West Fargo branch, and it serves commercial, education and government clients. Employee ownership is something it treats as core to how it operates. Braun Intertec is named as a partner on Central at the Horizon, The Annex Group’s affordable apartment building in downtown Fargo.

Nine service lines run across the practice, and two of them are worth separating out because they rarely sit inside the same firm.

The materials laboratory does more than acceptance testing. It performs petrographic analysis — examining the microstructure of hardened concrete, which is how you find out why a slab failed rather than only that it did — along with advanced concrete, cement and mortar testing. It also offers equipment calibration services, which means other firms’ gauges come here to be certified.

The geotechnical side spans subsurface exploration, in-situ testing, instrumentation, foundation design, retaining wall design, slope stability and pavement design. Instrumentation and slope stability are the long-horizon end of that work, monitoring a condition over time rather than issuing a report and leaving.

Nondestructive examination and natural and cultural resources are the two service lines that most expand the firm’s reach. The second recently grew: cultural resources expertise was added to the Twin Cities market, supporting archaeological and historic-review work on development projects — the sort of requirement that can hold up a permit for a year if nobody anticipated it. On the laboratory side, the firm acquired a Chicago-based concrete science laboratory, extending materials testing into Illinois.

Thirteen market groups organize the client base, and the notable ones are aerospace, mission critical, oil, gas and mining, power delivery, renewable energy, transportation and water. A mission critical group alongside power delivery and renewable energy points squarely at data center and utility-scale energy work, which is where much of this region’s heavy construction has moved.

Named project work includes air permitting for the Boswell Energy Center, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, and the Richard A. Wilkinson Middle School.

The geographic footprint is broader than the Minnesota base suggests: 31 offices across 30 cities in nine states, with a deep Texas presence spanning Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Fort Worth, Allen, Amarillo, Grapevine, Lubbock, Tyler, Wichita Falls and Wake Village, plus Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Georgia and Alabama.

Staff expertise is described as covering more than 100 technical disciplines. The firm markets itself under the line “The Science You Build On” and promotes STEM as part of its stated mission.