Ashland Inc. is a U.S.-based global specialty additives and ingredients company serving consumer and industrial markets including personal care, pharmaceuticals, coatings, and agriculture. It develops performance ingredients and technologies designed to enhance product functionality and sustainability.
Chemistry often operates behind the scenes in everyday products and industries. How does it help tackle food security while managing pressures on resources like water and land?
There are many misunderstandings about chemistry and chemicals. If you look at personal care, pharma and food, everybody is using chemistry in everything we do. But we need to come back to the basics of nutrition and feeding the world. How much food do we really need? That’s a big issue for many countries — some have a lot and some don’t have enough — so how we manage that will be critical.
Resources are going to become a big issue. Water is probably number one, and land will also be a major constraint around the world. I live in Arizona, and the whole issue of the Colorado River and states not agreeing about water is huge, and it’s all about agriculture. You can take a shorter shower, but that doesn’t move the needle — it’s about agriculture and what they use water for. In our case we’re not the main ingredient; we bring additives that boost performance and create more value for our customers.
Customers often say they want products that are simply “better.” In practical terms, what does “superior performance with sustainability” mean, and how do they measure whether a product truly delivers?
Before, it was just sustainability. The reality is that if it doesn’t work or it’s too expensive, nobody will use it.
What customers want is something that works better. It doesn’t matter whether it’s synthetic or not — if it performs better and meets the criteria, that’s what matters.
Consumers still read labels and care about what they put on their bodies, but sustainability for its own sake isn’t viable. They want something that is better and sustainable at the same time, and when that happens it creates a big opportunity for companies like us.
We have to demonstrate value area by area. In seed coatings, better integrity means less material lost during transport and less dust exposure for workers. But the real question customers ask is ROI. If the coating helps preserve expensive active ingredients or reduces the amount required, that creates value. In some cases, the active ingredient itself is worth far more than the coating.
How do you see innovation reshaping the industry and influencing how companies position themselves?
It will cannibalize some of our own products, but in a better way. The new technologies are more differentiated and we have IP around them, which allows us to create differentiation — something that’s lacking in the industry today. Everybody’s commoditized. It’s become a price game, and global trade has turned into a race to the bottom. Innovation opens opportunities for companies to refresh themselves.
The next three to five years will remain difficult as the world realigns, particularly around global trade and supply chains. Companies will need to differentiate with IP, services and expertise rather than just selling commodity products. After decades of globalization the chemical industry has become too commoditized, and companies are now asking what kind of player they want to be in the next ten years. That will lead to consolidation and reinvention. Our strategy is what we call “regionalizing to globalize”: building smaller facilities in different regions instead of producing everything in one place and shipping it worldwide. For example, success for some of these technologies would mean plants in Brazil and other agricultural regions, reducing trade exposure and making the supply chain more flexible.
Since becoming CEO in 2019, Ashland has undergone a significant transformation. As innovations in areas like food, agriculture and life sciences evolve, how do you think about where those technologies fit strategically and how they can scale across different sectors?
Our pharma business is our biggest business and part of our life sciences platform. In food and nutrition we have additives used in plant-based proteins, including ingredients that create texture in products like Beyond Meat. The technology itself is very flexible. We can modify it for pharma, agriculture, hair styling, skin care, industrial coatings or UV curing, and that flexibility excites us because the same chemistry can be adapted across many applications.
Two years ago these were technologies we were still developing. Now we’ve validated them and created versions used across many applications. We’re learning from those uses and asking where else the technology can be applied. For example, seed-coating technology has led to a version used for tablet coatings in pharmaceuticals, and now we’re exploring industrial coatings. Many of us have been in this industry for decades — I started in the 1980s working with acrylic chemistry, which goes into hair care, skincare, detergents, coatings and pharma. You learn to look at whether a technology has breadth and scalability. Some will remain niche and still create value, while others have the potential to scale globally. The question is whether they can become core chemistries like acrylics or polyurethane that reach many industries.
Bio-derived and nature-based chemistries often face scepticism about reliability and performance. What lessons have you learned about proving that these technologies can work at scale?
Some earlier technologies had limitations, but they were still widely used. Take alkyd paints — before the 1950s most paints were oil-based alkyd paints. They worked, but they couldn’t deliver all the properties needed, which is why acrylics eventually replaced them.
Our technology allows us to functionalize oils and create polymers with different properties. So the question customers ask is not whether it works, but how the modification creates value — better adhesion, better durability or improved performance in specific applications.
New chemistry can improve how agricultural products perform in the field. How do those innovations translate into practical benefits for farmers, and who do you typically partner with to bring them to market?
In agriculture we’re launching technologies like TVO and new wetting agents. The idea is better coverage when spraying and improved performance. With seed coatings, if the coating is stronger you lose less material during transportation and there’s less dust when workers handle it. That improves both performance and safety. You also reduce waste and get better use of active ingredients, and over time we can add other features that interact differently with those ingredients and continue improving performance.
It depends on the segment when it comes to partners. In some areas we know the space very well and already have relationships with the companies that have the expertise. In other areas, like industrial coatings, we may work with partners who understand that market better. In agriculture, the main players are very knowledgeable, and we already have relationships with many of them, but we’re also learning more about the regional network of formulators and companies that work directly with farmers.
In sectors like agriculture and life sciences, regulation often determines how quickly innovation reaches the market. How does that influence the development and adoption of new technologies?
Innovation is complicated because everything is so regulated. Even if you develop something good, it can take years to get approvals. If you want to replace something like PFAS or silicone, it may still take several years before the product can be approved and used. So we design products to fit within certain regulatory categories to accelerate approvals. Instead of taking eight years, something might reach the market in two or three if it fits within existing frameworks.
The large agricultural companies we sell to understand the technology, but they still ask whether it’s worth their time. If regulatory approval isn’t certain, they may hesitate to test something that might not pass. When they see that chemistry is already used in other industries, like personal care or pharma, that helps, but we still have to demonstrate performance and wait for approvals before sales can begin.
