Welcome to Kalundborg: the town Ozempic built
This once modest town is experiencing something akin to a gold rush as the Danish pharmaceutical giant which calls it home expands at an astonishing rate. What’s it like to live in Kalundborg?
Stepping off the bus at Kalundborg’s main station, I feel as if I have disembarked in the middle of nowhere. Kalundborg has none of the lustre and charm of Aarhus, the second-largest Danish city where I’ve been living for the past five months: there’s not a designer bag or supermodel look-alike in sight.
This tiny town on the north-west coast of Zealand, Denmark’s largest island, is about a 90-minute drive from the nation’s capital, Copenhagen. Cloaked in brown and grey, it is surrounded by shipping docks, warehouses, and the flashing lights of industry. The town uniform appears to be neat, unfashionable jeans and jackets, with the occasional track pant and worker’s boot. We’re a world away from Scandi-cool here. The view of the sea – cobalt blue folding into indigo – is marred by a long line of factories. And that’s because Kalundborg is home to a company that powers the entire Danish economy – the pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, maker of the diabetes and weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy.
“I don’t think there’s a family in Kalundborg who doesn’t know someone who works at Novo Nordisk,” the city’s mayor, Martin Damm, tells me in his office. We are drinking Danish filter coffee (it’s no Melbourne coffee, but I’ve gotten used to it) and mapping out a tour of the city.
It took a few weeks to set this up – Damm has been inundated with media requests from journalists since Wegovy went global. “I’ve had journalists from Italy, France, Germany, America and Canada come here in the last few weeks – but you’re the first Aussie,” he grins. Like most Danes, he speaks good English. Damm is wearing all blue – a light check shirt, navy pants and suede sneakers – and reminds me of actor John Lithgow. He is a great advocate for Kalundborg, to which he came after a career in the navy. “I was living in Copenhagen but then realised because my job shifted so much, I could live anywhere – and houses here were cheaper.”
While this is not the case any more (everyone I spoke to for this story emphasised the lack of housing since Novo Nordisk’s spectacular success), one can see why this was so a decade ago. Compared to Copenhagen and Aarhus, Kalundborg is but a speck on the map, a town of 17,500 people with one shopping street and a handful of restaurants. It is certainly growing, though – at one point during my tour Damm points to one of Novo Nordisk’s many building sites and cackles: “Have you seen our crane city?”
It’s no accident that Novo Nordisk and its sister companies have decided to stay here, despite their global success. Because Kalundborg is primarily an industrial town in a nation focused on green energy, it has most of the elements needed for a pharmaceutical company to succeed. Martin Jes Iversen, an economist from the Copenhagen Business School, says its proximity to transportation and logistics, its deepwater harbour and its long-established infrastructure and port system are big drawcards for companies. “For Novo Nordisk, which needs to be super strict on many compliance measures, Kalundborg also offers proximity to its headquarters in Bagsvaerd [in Copenhagen],” he says.
Kalundborg is also a town of subcontractors, which Damm says has been a feature for the past 50 years. We are driving around town, and for a while he falls silent before we stop next to an empty park. Ahead of us there is a large, fenced-off lot with a bunch of buildings. Damm waves his hand at the lot, and proceeds to list four reasons why his town has the edge when it comes to industrial production. “If you need someone to weld stainless steel which can be approved by US authorities, we have all the certificates. We have many craftsmen who can help larger companies achieve their goals. Secondly, we have a lot of specialised utility services, including water treatment facilities. When you use a lot of water, like Novo does, you have to handle the wastewater, and you have to go to a place where there are skilled people that can handle that amount of water and wastewater.”
He explains that the city’s water treatment approach laid the foundation of something called the Kalundborg Symbiosis, a partnership between 17 of the city’s public and private companies that have developed the world’s first “industrial symbiosis”. What this means is that one company’s waste becomes another company’s resource, with the goal being to minimise as much waste as possible.
“When you come to Kalundborg, you are using every resource and recirculating it. This is a great plus for companies who are focused on green energy,” Damm says. This feeds into his fourth point about the city: all its energy is green. “We have wind, solar energy, biomass – it’s all local.” With Novo Nordisk committed to a target of zero production waste by 2030, manufacturing half of its insulin in a city supported by green energy sources is a no-brainer.
Education has also taken off in Kalundborg. Damm says that eight years ago, there were no tertiary institutions in the area. Today, there are 12. “On the first of September, this site will have temporary buildings for the University of Copenhagen opening,” says Damm, pointing in the direction of some scraggly bushes. “The Denmark Technical University has also opened up spots in Kalundborg this summer.”
As Damm and I continue to drive around, I am struck by the scale of Novo Nordisk’s presence in this city. Its factories span 1.6sqkm, and most spare land has already been bought or earmarked for Novo-related activities, such as more housing to fit all the workers flooding in from all over the world. Five years ago, the company even got its own tram line.
Last November, Novo Nordisk announced it would invest a further 42 billion Danish krone (about $9.2 billion) in Kalundborg between 2023 and 2029 to build six new factories (including a factory to ferment yeast into insulin), a wastewater treatment plant, water supply infrastructure and roads – “Basically, everything you need to run a site,” says Michael Hallgren, senior vice president of active pharmaceutical ingredients manufacturing at Novo Nordisk.
“This also includes spending money on training people – we need every kind of employee at Novo Nordisk, from administration to maintenance to machine operators, engineers and researchers,” he tells me. Hallgren, who has worked at the company for 30 years, commutes to Kalundborg from his home 70km away. I asked him what the company plans to do to get all these new employees here. “In 2018 we started a collaboration with universities in Denmark, and since then we have established engineering education in Kalundborg in all the areas we need researchers,” he answers. “Today we have 300 students on campus, and within the next four years it will increase to 1000. That is our supply chain of academics.”
Novo Nordisk is also training operators to keep up with the soaring worldwide demand for class GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide 1) drugs that treat diabetes and obesity. “With the new GLP-1 coming in, the demand for our products ... has increased dramatically – that is the driver for our investments,” Hallgren says.
Before 2021, Novo Nordisk would invest about a billion Danish krone ($220 million) a year into Kalundborg. But from the moment semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic, was approved for weight loss by America’s drug regulator in 2021, the company started putting in the big bucks. “That was the first time we announced an 18 billion Danish krone [$4 billion] investment,” Hallgren says. All up, Novo Nordisk has sunk 60 billion Danish krone ($13.2 billion) into the town in the past four years.
“Novo Nordisk has exceeded the Danish nation’s GDP, and they are now the biggest company in Europe in terms of market capitalisation,” says Iversen, the Copenhagen Business School economist. Bloomberg and Fortune recently put the company’s market value at $US570 billion, while Goldman Sachs estimates that by 2030 the global market for anti-obesity medications could grow to $US100 billion. “Almost 20 per cent of all new Danish jobs in 2023 were created by Novo Nordisk – we’ve never had that before,” he adds. Novo Nordisk has always played a large part in Danish society but now, with the spread of the injectable weight-loss medication Wegovy, it has become a globally recognised name.
Founded in 1923 by Danish Nobel laureate August Krogh and his wife Marie, the company began as two separate entities: Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium, which commercialised the production of insulin; and Novo Terapeutisk Laboratorium, a competitor started by a former Nordisk chemist Thorvald Pedersen and his brother Herald, in the same area. After competing against each other for decades, the two merged in 1989 and became Novo Nordisk A/S – now the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy.
“We are here to defeat serious chronic diseases,” Camilla Sylvest, the executive vice president of commercial strategy, tells me at the company’s headquarters in Bagsværd. We are sitting in a spacious boardroom inside the amazing spherical structure that is the Novo Nordisk building. (I’m later told the design was inspired by the complex insulin molecule).
It took me months to secure an interview with a Novo Nordisk spokesperson, because the company, I’ve been told, is not used to receiving so much media attention. That’s all about to change: Wegovy, the version of Ozempic specifically targeted for weight loss, is already going gangbusters in the US. Now, with its launch in Australia this month, and a recent approval for sale in the world’s biggest country, China, it’s all about to go up another level.
The potential of what are known as semaglutide medications goes far beyond helping people manage diabetes and shed kilos: it could also potentially cut the risk of developing many different types of cancers and tumours. Obesity increases the risk of developing 13 types of cancers, including colon, kidney, prostate, endometrial, ovarian and breast, so it stands to reason that eliminating and controlling excessive weight gain would also reduce cancer rates.
A recent US study examined the medical records of more than 1.6 million people diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Case Western Reserve University scientists compared those prescribed GLP-1 drugs and those who received insulin, the typical treatment for this diabetes. The study showed individuals treated with any GLP-1 medication between 2005 and 2018 were less likely to get 10 out of the 13 cancers compared to those who took insulin.
There’s also buzz around Ozempic and Wegovy when it comes to fertility, with reports of “Ozempic babies” (where women struggling with infertility report suddenly getting pregnant while taking the drug). Researchers are turning their attention to how this is happening, and whether it’s actually safe. We know that obesity affects the hormonal balance that regulates the menstrual cycle, and that women with a BMI above 27 are three times less likely to conceive than those with lower BMI. Studies also show that type 2 diabetes and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) are both linked to obesity and fertility difficulties.
However studies suggest these drugs should not be used in pregnancy due to potential risks of foetal abnormalities, and Australia’s drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, recommends women of childbearing age should use contraception alongside semaglutide. So Ozempic is either on track to become a panacea for some of mankind’s biggest health challenges - or not. Novo Nordisk is betting on the former. “To defeat chronic illness … we need to invest in a lot of innovation, and that takes us decades,” Sylvest says. That’s why the company sponsors so many grants in the health and sciences industries. It’s also good business: with Novo Nordisk set to lose its exclusive rights to semaglutide in about eight years, she knows her company is on borrowed time, and needs to capitalise on the demand for Wegovy now while it still holds the patent.
Right now, demand is so high it cannot keep up. With competitors such as US drug giant Eli Lilly nipping at its heels, Novo Nordisk has embarked on an aggressive expansion plan across Denmark and the US, as well as in other countries such as Algeria, Brazil, China, France, Iran, Japan and Russia. “We don’t exactly know what the demand is – we just know that it is increasing and that it’s for sure not fulfilled yet,” Sylvest says when I ask whether she feels her company is keeping up. “We have many more people who would like to have our products than what we are currently able to supply to.”
Kalundborg is central to this supply plan,and Hallgren says the company is staying there for the long term. “We have been on the Kalundborg site for 50 years … and we are going to keep building for the next 50 years,” he tells me. The final factory of the six currently under construction will be in full operation in 2029, and the first will be up and running next year. Hallgren acknowledges that while the speed and breadth of the construction has resulted in bottlenecks, “it takes time to expand a city, to develop the surrounding areas and build houses”.
The locals are certainly feeling it. Vicky Anderson, 43, is a local who moved away to study before returning seven years ago. She says the Kalundborg of her youth is gone: the cheap houses have disappeared, and development is everywhere. “The town today is really busy, and there’s a lot of foreign people around,” she tells me as I’m about to check out. “All the houses, the rentals – everything – is occupied. And expensive.” I nod in furious agreement. The only accommodation within 10km of Kalundborg I could find was this simple hostel, which cost me $150 a night.
“It’s like that all year round,” Anderson says, shrugging. “We are lucky because we are a hostel and we have a lot of rooms and beds in the rooms, so we can take the big bookings. The Novo Nordisk workers usually check in on Monday and check out on Thursday and Friday, and then we get other groups over the weekend”. Sometimes the hostel is full, so Novo workers have to rent accommodation one to two hours from the town, she adds.
I ask her if she thinks Novo Nordisk is good or bad for Kalundborg. She thinks for a minute and eventually says good overall, but bad if you want to settle down and buy a house. “For all the young people who want to move out of their parents’ houses, it’s a struggle. But at least [Novo] brings life into the town.”
But this is where Kalundborg’s advantages end. While its industrial credentials are certainly impressive, the town still lacks a thriving cultural life. “We need to do better,” real estate agent Thomas Jensen tells me in his office at Estate Kalundborg. “There’s people coming in from outside now, and if they look at Kalundborg, we are still a sleepy little town. Yes, we have a cinema, a shopping street. But if you ask the locals, they think it’s boring.”
The 39-year-old has been in the industry for 20 years but decided to open his own firm after seeing foreign workers flock to the town in the past decade. Once upon a time it was Danes who bought houses here to get away from the hustle and bustle of larger cities. Today they must compete against domestic and international workers eager to cash in on the thousands of jobs being created by Novo Nordisk.
“At the moment, I have 30 properties for sale. In the past, we had about 50 to 60. Last month alone, I sold 14,” Jensen says. “I have sold to two couples from China in the last year, as well as some from Serbia, Croatia, Spain and Bulgaria.” If I hadn’t just spent a few days in Kalundborg, I’d be surprised at hearing this. While the Danes are tolerant, their smaller cities aren’t exactly teeming with diversity.
Before I return to Aarhus, I step into Costa Kalundborg Kaffe for a coffee. It’s on the foreshore and is run by two Kiwis. Shaun Gamble, an ex-Novo Nordisk employee, is the owner, and the manager is Sheryl Peterson. The place is busy, and Peterson often breaks up our conversation to help her barista, 23-year-old local Mateus, make coffee. “I’ve been here [in Denmark] for 18 years,” she tells me. “I met a Danish man in New Zealand, then lived in England and now here. The rest is three children and a house.” While she doesn’t live in the centre of town, she’s close enough to have seen how Novo Nordisk’s success has changed it over the years. “The biggest thing I’ve noticed is the traffic. The road out of Kalundborg towards where I live is just one long road with maybe a few roundabouts – it used to take 15 minutes,” she says. “Now, if you want to come into town in the mornings there’s just queues, and it takes like 45 minutes – it’s crazy.”
A lot of Novo Nordisk workers drive in from Copenhagen, a journey of about 1 hour and 15 minutes. These days it’s taking longer, and Damm says the council is working on extending the highway between the two cities. There are also several pit stops being added all around Kalundborg – “basically a park and ride”, Peterson adds – where workers can park their cars and catch a shuttle to Novo Nordisk.
I ask her if she knows someone who works there, and she laughs. “We all do. Mateus’ mum works there, for one,” she waves at her barista. Mateus says she’s just started after jumping ship from Novo Nordisk Engineering (once part of the Novo Nordisk Foundation but now independent) where she worked for 12 years.
Does she like it? “Oh yes; they treat people well there,” he says.
People often liken the rise of Novo Nordisk to another Kalundborg firm, Carmen Curlers. In its heyday, the company produced electric hair curlers that revolutionised hair curling. It employed 3500 people, but when it went out of business in the 1990s the town was devastated.
I ask Damm if he ever worries about history repeating. “I am not nervous that Novo Nordisk will close or move from Kalundborg,” he says. “It is a completely different company from Carmen Curlers, who had only one product they sold worldwide.”
He’s confident that Novo Nordisk’s strategy of diversifying into many different products, as well as its investment in research and development, will withstand the test of time. “And of course, the production facilities in Kalundborg are completely unique – they cannot simply be moved to another location,” Damm adds.
I ask Hallgren if he thinks Ozempic will change the world, and in typical Danish fashion, he underplays his employer’s impact and tells me he is but a “production guy”. “The ones who talk about [how great the product is] are marketing,” he laughs.
As for Kalundborg, well. As it stands, it’s a far cry from a great European city. But with Novo Nordisk’s plans to stay for at least the next half-century, perhaps this quiet industrial town will come to resemble Denmark’s more glamorous cities as the workers pile in, keen to ride the anti-obesity wave.
Or maybe it will just remain an industrial oasis that quietly, yet steadily, powers an entire country’s economy while changing the world.
