GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Executives with Perrigo and Grand Rapids city leaders held a ribbon-cutting ceremony Wednesday for the company’s new corporate headquarters in downtown.

Perrigo’s new North American Corporate Headquarters is located in the Grand Rapids Innovation Park on the Medical Mile.

“This area we’re standing in right here is called the Medical Mile and it presents tremendous collaboration opportunities for what we’re doing, but also partnering with many research facilities, MSU specifically and others as well,” Murray Kessler, Perrigo’s president and CEO, said. “Perrigo wanted to be part of that Medical Mile … to help grow our business.”

The Right Place helped put together the package that brought the company to Grand Rapids. That includes $3.7 million in state incentives. Perrigo is expected to invest nearly $45 million over the next 15 years and is expected to create 170 high-paying jobs.

“This has been a relatively tough few years, with COVID and working from home and supply chain disruption and a second wave of COVID and a war in Ukraine,” Kessler said, mentioning 100 Perrigo employees in Ukraine. 

“But through all of that we’ve done a major reconfiguration of the company over the last three years,” Kessler said.

He said the Perrigo has grown and switched from a health care company to a consumer self-care company.

Grand Rapids Mayor Rosalynn Bliss also spoke at the event and said she is glad to have the headquarters in downtown.

“We all know that Grand Rapids, like cities all over our country, experienced incredible struggles and challenges through the pandemic,” Bliss said. “It was projects like this that gave me a ton of hope. … Hope about the future of our city, that we were going to get through the challenging times together.”