Plant-based ingredients producer Roquette Frères will invest €25 million in liquid and powder polyol production at its site in northern France.
Roquette’s site in Lestrem, northern France, is the largest polyol plant in the world offering a wide variety of products.
This investment will improve equipment efficiency and increase safety standards. It will also help to standardise some industrial operations contributing to an overall production performance improvement.
Driven by the fast-increasing trend for healthier and sustainable food and lifestyle, the demand for nutritional solutions is dramatically increasing. According to Euromonitor, the market of healthier food products is expected to grow by about 15% in value between 2021 and 2026.
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Thanks to the nutritional benefits they offer, polyols are addressing this trend. Produced from plant-based raw materials such as maize or wheat, polyols are principally used as sugar alternatives in food products such as sugar-reduced or sugar-free confectionery, chocolate, chewing gum, baked goods, or snacks. The numerous scientific publications on the nutritional benefits of polyols for the human body evidence the positive impact of polyols in a healthy and well-balanced diet.
Polyols are also key excipients for the pharmaceutical sector. Thanks to Roquette’s superior quality standards, polyols are well known and appreciated as pharmaceutical excipients in oral dosage forms. Directly compressible, polyols help the formulation of all types of tablets, and some are adapted for swallowable, chewable, or dispersible or effervescent tablets.
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According to Pascal Leroy, Senior Vice-President of Core Ingredients at Roquette, Roquette is recognised as a global leader in polyols. "We are uniquely positioned to address customers’ needs as we strive to be the best partner for the polyol markets, offering a wide range, very well adapted to all markets and backed by a global service and technical assistance network. Thanks to this investment, we will now strengthen the reliability of the supply and our global industrial footprint.”
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