The Bend biopesticide-maker Suterra wants to beef up nontoxic pheromone manufacturing at its facility in Juniper Ridge.

Company leaders have met with city planners about a proposal to build a 16,000-square-foot building in which to make more pheromones in-house, according to plans on file with the city of Bend. The company also is looking to construct a new loading dock and equipment yard.

Inside part of its existing 75,000-square-foot building on Talus Place, Suterra already makes some of the synthetic pheromones it mixes into products it packages and ships for sale around the world. The pheromones disrupt insects from mating and affecting crops.

Now the company would like to make more of the types of pheromones it uses, rather than rely on outside contractors.

“You outsource that and buy that, your supplier is capturing that margin,” said Matt Bohnert, Suterra’s president.

Company revenue has been rising around 25 percent each year in certain markets around the world, Bohnert said.

At an expected cost of between $5 million and $10 million and the addition of 10 or more employees, the new facility won’t be cheap. But Suterra’s parent company, Los Angeles-based Roll International, views the construction job as a wise move, Bohnert said.

“Roll has believed investments for the long run are the way to grow,” he said.

The goal is to start construction on the new building in June or July and finish by the end of the year, said Jay Nesbitt, the company’s director of chemical operations.

Suterra LLC now has around 75 employees in Bend and 145 worldwide.

The company started in 1984 under the name Consep Inc., as a spinoff of drug-technology developer Bend Research, according to a document on file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and The Bulletin’s archives.

Consep, which originally had space on Southwest Columbia Street, went public on the Nasdaq in 1994 and later acquired other companies. A company merged with Consep and sold it to Roll at auction for more than $3.3 million in 2001. Roll changed Consep’s name to Suterra.

Making a higher percentage of pheromones for Suterra products, rather than buying from external sources, will help lower expenses in the long run, Bohnert said.

That philosophy also applied for company operations in the 1990s.

In 1995, Consep turned a profit for the first time ever, soon after it had acquired Farchan Laboratories Inc., a chemical manufacturer in Gainesville, Fla., according to The Bulletin’s archives. It began operating Farchan as an independent subsidiary. But the Farchan facility burned down, and quarterly losses became the norm again.