Wood-fiber insulation is about to be in a lot more homes. Less than a year after TimberHP, a Maine-based manufacturer of three distinct lines of insulating wood composites, officially opened its 600,000-sq.-ft production facility in a former paper mill, this once-lean startup has finalized a partnership with Saint-Gobain, a multi-billion dollar leader in the design and production of light and sustainable building materials. The partnership grants CertainTeed Inc., Saint-Gobain’s North American building products subsidiary, the rights to distribute TimberHP’s insulation products throughout the continent, including as its exclusive distributor in Canada.

When TimberHP’s co-founders, architect Matthew O’Malia and materials chemist Dr. Joshua Henry, conceived of this company, the primary driver was to fill what O’Malia has called “a performance void” in the sustainability space. Basically, the U.S. home market has a lot of wood-framed homes and the most common insulation materials—typically spray foam and fiberglass—are either toxic or energy-inefficient. “We really liked the product and we really believed in the product,” Henry says. “So, we wanted to understand why it wasn’t in North America.”

A transcontinental partnership

Many European companies have been producing wood-fiber insulation products for decades, but with little to no financial incentive to export the stuff across the Atlantic. One of those companies happens to be Saint-Gobain, and in 2022, when TimberHP’s Madison, ME, plant was still being fitted out, O’Malia and Henry visited Saint-Gobain’s production facility in France. As it happened, Saint-Gobain and TimberHP shared an equipment vendor in Dieffenbacher, a German systems solutions company. That common acquaintance led the co-founders to Saint-Gobain’s headquarters in La Défense, just outside Paris.

“We were looking at different technical solutions and configurations for the equipment to better understand it,” O’Malia explains. “So, when we started to have this conversation about a strategic partnership, we were convinced by their vision. We also saw the benefit of their operational excellence. They understand the technology and they also understand the opportunity of how wood-fiber insulation products can ramp up in North American markets.”

The value-add that a company like Saint-Gobain brings to this arrangement is indeed significant, not just in terms of technical expertise but also with regard to market presence and wherewithal to ramp up distribution.

Henry highlights the facts that CertainTeed owns Volu-Matic, which he describes as “the best pneumatic blowing machine for loose-fill insulation,” and Saint-Gobain operates a “world-class research and development” facility in nearby Worcester, MA. (Of note, CertainTeed also operates its Malvern Innovation Center in Malvern, PA, which the company describes as a “living laboratory” for testing out new building products.)

While this infrastructure will prove invaluable, the intent of this partnership in the near term is simply to get the Madison plant up and running to full capacity, up to and including TimberBoard, TimberHP’s wood-fiber rigid-board insulation product, which is estimated to roll off the lines by the end of this year. The other two products, TimberBatt and TimberFill, have been in production for months and still represent the first-of-its-kind products for U.S. markets.

Full capacity, the goal

“This is a product that North America really needs, not just in Maine and the Northeast, but all over the country. And to make it available to the people who want it, we’re going to need to some help,” Henry admits. Any efforts on the part of Henry and O’Malia in seeking that help were clearly covert, but what they did reveal to potential partners received “a lot of interest from a lot of bigger building products companies,” Henry says.

Discussions between TimberHP and Saint-Gobain began in late 2023, and both parties indicated there was a clear “alignment of vision.” According to a Saint-Gobain spokesperson, “Their products complement our offerings well and will help us to further provide a full slate of sustainable solutions in North America.”

Among those solutions are ongoing efforts electrify the company’s gypsum wallboard plant outside Montreal, which will make it the first net-zero carbon production plant (scopes 1 and 2) in North America, as well as extensive efforts to divert waste from landfills by upcycling discarded gypsum, asphalt, and other materials. Much of this is made possible through NOVA Ventures, Saint-Gobain’s venture arm, which launched in 2006 “to serve as a bridge, working collaboratively with startups to … form long-term partnerships” and provide “access to the competencies across the Saint-Gobain organization.”

The nature of each NOVA-led partnership varies; they can be limited to licensing, direct investments, or joint ventures. In the case of TimberHP, it is both an investment and a co-development arrangement (not a merger or acquisition), the price for which will include NOVA Ventures having two seats on TimberHP’s board of directors.

Tapping into Saint-Gobain’s and CertainTeed’s existing North American distribution pipelines holds great value, but that’s only one piece to the puzzle, according to TimberHP’s co-founders. This investment and partnership are “really about maximizing the efficiency of our plant, which is a 24/7 operation, and increasing our capacity based on the market and our growth,” O’Malia says.

He continues that the aim is to get the Madison plant at full production capacity by the end of 2026, which would yield an estimated top line annual revenue of $170 million. “We’re off to a great start. But there are many factors to achieving that goal. We’re mindful of where we are at and where we need to be.”

First of many steps

The partnership will “open new markets” for TimberHP’s products, according to the Saint-Gobain spokesperson, but there are no immediate plans to get other production plants online. The first step in all this, according to O’Malia, is getting Madison at full production and not attempting to replicate its example any time soon. “What has been achieved here in Madison [is extraordinary],” he says, but the context surrounding it was quite specific. “We were very fortunate to have this opportunity to revitalize this [paper] mill … but as you look across the ‘wood baskets’ [of North America], you might not have those assets available, like an old mill building.”

O’Malia doesn’t dismiss the possibility of future expansion; he’d just prefer to focus on the task at hand. But he raises a salient point. Many regions within America’s so-called “wood baskets,” from the North- and Southeast to the Pacific Northwest, are vastly underutilized. Granted, a hydroelectric dam or shuttered paper mill may not be laying in waiting everywhere you look. What those regions and many towns within them do have are the raw constituent materials, industrial byproduct (i.e., wood waste), and “a lot of folks with a lot of experience in wood products.”

“You can always buy equipment, but you need a manufacturing base of people who want to do the work of what we’re trying to do,” Henry says. “And there are a lot of communities like that across North America that are hungry for revitalization.”

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