Longtime Minnesota-based generic drugmaker Upsher-Smith Laboratories, which was sold to a Taiwanese firm in 2024, is closing one of its two drug plants in the state and refocusing work here on the contract drug-manufacturing business.
The company, which was the subject of a billionaire family’s five-year legal feud, is laying off at least 58 employees at its plant on 23rd Avenue North in Plymouth, according to a federal WARN Act notice filed with the state Thursday.
Some employees at Upsher-Smith’s Maple Grove facility on Evenstad Drive also will be laid off, although the plant will stay open.
The decision is part of Taiwan-based Bora Pharmaceuticals' “strategic realignment to optimize global operations and better serve our customers,” an Upsher-Smith spokesperson said in an email.
“This transition ensures the continued supply of high-quality products to our customers while enhancing operational efficiency,” the spokesperson said.
Pharmacist and chemist Frederick Alfred Upsher-Smith founded the pharmaceutical company in 1919, working in a Minneapolis laboratory to help people with cardiac disease, a company website says.
Ken Evenstad bought Upsher-Smith in 1969, and his family owned the company for nearly half a century. The Minnesota Star Tribune previously reported that Evenstad turned around the business, redirecting it toward the then-new field of generic medications.
The Evenstad family became one of Minnesota’s richest, but a feud spilled into the public eye in the 2010s as a legal battle over the family’s estate ensued. The family sold Upsher-Smith to the Japanese company Sawai Pharmaceutical in 2017, and it was sold again to Bora last year.