Biotechnology in Home Care

The home care sector has become one of the most promising areas for biotechnology innovation within the broader chemicals industry. This report explores biotechnology's opportunity in the home care industry, its potential to help companies meet increasing consumer expectations for both performance and sustainability, the barriers currently limiting wider adoption, and recommendations for overcoming those challenges.

Today, sustainability is a key priority for home care brands. Replacing petrochemical-derived ingredients with bio-based alternatives is becoming an increasingly important focus for research and development. While some bio-based ingredients can be sourced directly from nature, many will need to be developed through innovative biotechnology platforms. This is why home care has emerged as a significant opportunity for biotechnology, enabling the development of ingredients that can help reduce reliance on fossil-based feedstocks while maintaining the effectiveness consumers expect from cleaning products.

Beyond replacing existing ingredients, biotechnology also has the potential to unlock entirely new solutions. Advances in biotechnology may enable the creation of novel surfactants, polymers, enzymes, and other functional ingredients that deliver enhanced performance, improved sustainability profiles, and new formulation possibilities for home care products.

Unfortunately, several barriers must be overcome if biotechnology is to achieve broader adoption within the home care sector. These include:

• Cost
• The ability to achieve production at scale
• Demonstrating consistent performance within complex formulations

If these challenges can be addressed, we can expect to see increased use of biotechnology-derived ingredients in home care products, helping manufacturers meet both their sustainability targets and consumer expectations for product performance.

Croda's latest report on the role of biotechnology innovation in the chemicals sector examines these barriers to adoption within the home care industry and provides clear recommendations for accelerating progress:

• It recommends the establishment of an independent global biotechnology and home care working group, bringing together biotechnology specialists, ingredient manufacturers, formulators, and brand owners to share knowledge, ideas, and expertise in a structured, collaborative, and non-competitive environment.
• It advocates the development of better methods for demonstrating the performance and mode of action of biotechnology-derived ingredients in home care applications.
• It encourages greater standardisation across the industry to support predictable, repeatable formulation outcomes and facilitate wider adoption of biotechnology innovations.