Roquette Company-Sorbito (Interview)

In fact Roquette started to work on sorbitol and to produce it in small quantities in the early fifties. Thanks to our application laboratories, we quickly discovered a huge number of possible applications for this product, some of them were really unexpected.

One of the big outcomes of sorbitol is its use as humectants in toothpastes and chewing gums. It is also an efficient alternative to sugar, which makes it popular in sugar-free pharmaceutical syrups. It is also widely used in sugar-free candies. We therefore developed numerous grades of sorbitols and derived polyols, with a wide range of purity and final properties. Sorbitol is also a raw material for the vitamin C, which production volumes have been significantly moved to China these past years. Because Roquette started very early to work on sorbitol and its derived products it is now a leading producer of other polyols (maltitol, xylitol, and so on).

But sorbitol is also well known in the chemical industry: it is used as an initiator to make polyether polyols, which make rigid polyurethane foams when reacted with isocyanates. This is a rather big market with strong growth perspectives as rigid PU foams are used in insulation systems. The insulation performances allow for reduced energy consumption and at the end reduced carbon dioxide emissions. In Asia rigid PU foams growth rate is between 15% and 20% nowadays. This made the Roquette portfolio very rich. Now Roquette has a very strong market share of sorbitol in the world. Roquette has sorbitol manufacturing plants in the three main regions of the world: Europe, Americas and more recently in China, in Lianyungang, where it built in 2004 a new factory to include the production of polyols.

We started to work on isosorbide very early. But at that time we did not find relevant applications, except its use as a raw material of an active ingredient of a heart medicine, which is still produced today but in very small quantities.