The Itaconix team (Courtesy of itaconix)
Chances are you have never heard of Itaconix, but chances are its products are part of your life. The company, which has kept a low profile, develops and manufactures plant-based polymers used globally as non-toxic ingredients in over 150 consumer brands, ranging from automatic dish detergents to hair styling products.
The company makes these polymers from itaconic acid, a biodegradable natural material found in humans and plants, which is the basis for its products.
Itaconix’s Stratham-based facility is the only facility in the world that produces these polymers, claims CEO John Shaw. Itaconix makes those polymers through a proprietary process from itaconic acid, which looks like sugar. It procures the itaconic acid from China. Shaw says the polymers are all plant based and non-toxic. “You can eat the material,” he says, adding that after being manipulated, the polymer can be used in a variety of products, including paints and coatings, detergents and as an absorbent in diapers.
Itaconix’s polymer makes up 10% of the powder in Hannaford’s automatic dish detergent pods and helps keep glasses shiny and waterways free of phosphates, Shaw says. “The biggest area for us right now is dishwashing detergent,” he says. “We’re the best replacement for phosphates in detergents, which can end up in waterways causing algae blooms and killing fish.”
Shaw says the polymers created at Itaconix are also carbon friendly. “It’s actually a carbon dioxide reduction technology because the plant-based sugar that’s being used has been absorbed by the plant and we’re capturing the itaconic acid after a fermentation process,” he says.
The company sprang from a happenstance when Shaw, who grew up in Nashua and has 35 years of business experience, was invited to attend the UNH Holloway Business Plan competition awards dinner in 2008. “I met a student at the dinner who told me about a green chemistry project that Yvon [Durant] worked on,” he says referring Itaconix’s co-founder and CTO who was UNH material sciences professor at the time researching green products. Durant had been studying applications for itaconic acid in the early 2000s and eventually developed the biodegradable, non-toxic polymers now used in Itaconix’s products.
“Two days later I was in Yvon’s office, and three months later, in September of 2008, we’d launched the company,” Shaw says, adding that the company started in Dover and had its first customer in 2009. “It had been a holy grail in the polymer world for over 60 years. Pfizer had tried to file a patent in the 1960s, but it wasn’t economical, and here was Durant, a French chemist; he had figured out something the world had tried to figure out for years and he did it.”
Itaconix is publicly traded on the London stock exchange, and the U.S. OTC market under the ticker “ITX” after completing a reverse merger into a UK-based company in 2016 to expand its presence in Europe. “The story has taken a long time to grow, but it’s a great story coming out of UNH. Every time you buy a box of automatic dish detergent you know some of that money is making its way back to UNH.”
Shaw says Itaconix is constantly looking for ways to expand. “We’ve been growing rapidly, at a rate of a little over 60% from 2018,” Shaw says. “Last year we had $5.6 million in sales, and the first half of this year, we publicly announced that we already had $4 million in sales.” For more information, visit itaconix.com.
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