Day 4: Pharma and Pastries

Today´s blog is being written by Ivy. I am a first year grad student focusing on medical textiles. In the morning we were running a little behind since Ken had to check his brackets for the NCAA basketball championship. Once he was done we were ready to hit the road.

The first stop was at Landsteiner Scientific which is a pharmaceutical company. They mostly produce generic drugs for sale in Mexico. Right now they are only able to sell their products in Mexico but are working on being able to distribute their products in other Latin American countries. Due to FDA regulations it´s harder for them to meet the standards to sell in the USA but that is a goal they are working towards. One thing they noted that was different was that they do not advertise which is much different than most US Pharma companies. They also have a small biotechnology division which is rapidly growing, even during the recession. Since this area is such a new technology for Mexico they don`t have organizations similiar to North Carolina Biotechnoloy Center to help provide them with resources or services. They did mention they partner with a local university to help them with research in this division. After listening to an overview on the company we got to take a tour of their facilities. It was really interesting to see all the different areas in their discovery lab, quality control, and production areas.

After the tour it was time for lunch at a restaurant called La Selva. There we had tortas which are very similiar to sandwich. After finishing our meal Madison was nice enough to show us some Zumba moves such as the sleep leg! We also got see some birds and a beautiful garden next door.

Then it was onward on to Tia Rosa which is part of Grupo Bimbo. They make all sorts of products such as breads, pastries, cookies, fruit grain bars etc. They gave us a tour of their factory. It was neat to see all the different steps of the process and how they could easily rearrange their set-up to produce a variety of products on one line. The factory was also extremely clean. The student delegates especially loved the bigotes which reminded me of a croissant filled which chocolate. The plant manager gave us some samples fresh off the line!


Finally the evening ended with the much talked about SURPRISE. Which was a wonderful dinner at our hosts Laura & Joas`s stunning house. They served us all sorts of wonderful traditional Mexican food plus they had ice we could drink which made me happy. We celebrated David`s, another delegate, birthday which tres leche cake. It was delicious. After a long day it was time to head back to the hotel because Thursday our day was going to start at 6:30AM.