Croda: Leading the agricultural adjuvant industry with global network, innovative products, customized solutions & exceptional customer support
In this interview, we delve into the dynamic of agricultural adjuvants with Croda. Despite market upheavals, Croda's commitment to cutting-edge research and customer-centric solutions positions us as a beacon in the industry, addressing challenges with sustainability and performance at the forefront. Our strategic global presence and tailored approach to formulation development not only meet but exceed the evolving needs of modern agriculture.
Can you describe the market landscape of the agriculture adjuvant market? What are the drivers, challenges and trends of the development of the sector?
Since 2020, the global adjuvants market has experienced substantial disruption in the wake of the global pandemic, supply chain interruptions, and inflationary pressures. As seen across the wider crop protection industry, some side effects include market participants facing significant procurement challenges—from product shortages and limited availability to an oversupply of raw materials, resulting in an atypical inventory build-up and subsequent destocking. All of this has occurred at a time when farmers and growers themselves have experienced significant fluctuation in food commodity prices, which in turn influences their crop input purchasing decisions.
Despite these uncertainties, the demand for high-performance adjuvants remains undiminished. The need to deliver increasingly complex formulations comprising multiple active ingredients under demanding conditions, combined with increasingly stringent regulatory and environmental pressures, presents a clear challenge to the industry. While technical performance is a given, there is a need to improve the efficiency of product formulations whilst at the same time reducing the total active ingredient usage, providing both economic and environmental benefits.
Additionally, adjuvants play an increasingly critical role in two key areas:
- Differentiating both new and existing conventional active ingredients and mixtures, as the number of newly introduced conventional actives continues to decline due to the rising challenges in discovery, cost, and development pace, and
- Supporting novel concentrates and tank mixtures containing both conventional and biological actives, where microbial compatibility is essential for ensuring effective control in the field.
Moreover, new adjuvant technologies are crucial for adapting to changes in application equipment. This is particularly evident with the rapid adoption of UAV/drone spraying technologies in several key agricultural regions. These shifts in baseline technologies are driving the continuous evolution of both tank-added and built-in adjuvants, pushing the development of novel substances that meet increasingly demanding regulatory requirements. When carefully selected, these innovations have the potential to deliver best-in-class performance across diverse application environments, allowing for quicker and more confident customisation of product performance without increasing risks related to labelling, end-use certification, or regulatory compliance for pesticide and adjuvant formulations.
Can you give us an overview of Croda's adjuvant product line? Highlight some featured products and their application situation.
Croda offers a diverse range of novel adjuvants designed to meet the complex criteria involved in selecting the right solution for agricultural applications. Whether considering built-in versus tank-mix options, systemic versus contact modes of action, leaf angles, surface types, or application methods such as drone or boom sprayers, our portfolio addresses these variables effectively. Many of Croda’s adjuvants are also OMRI-listed and are suitable for biological formulations.
Examples from Croda’s Adjuvant Range:
- Atplus™ DRT-7000 – Specifically designed for drone applications, this adjuvant reduces drift while enhancing efficacy
- Atplus™ DRT Range – A collection of drift-reduction technology products, offering both ready-to-use solutions and building blocks for customising adjuvant performance
- Tween™ Range – Based on polysorbate chemistry, this range includes ethoxylated and alkoxylated variants that improve spray retention, leaf penetration, and humectancy, all while minimising phytotoxicity
- Atplus™ UEP-100 – A built-in adjuvant designed to enhance the uptake of systemic or translaminar active ingredients, with additional benefits such as increased spray retention and humectancy
- Hydravance™ 200 – A soil-wetting adjuvant that improves water penetration into hydrophobic soils, enhancing water distribution and percolation throughout the soil profile
To stay at the forefront of innovation and meet evolving formulation and application needs, Croda continuously evaluates the impact of structural changes across key product technologies. By leveraging extensive knowledge of structure-property relationships, we develop materials that offer new, multi-layered benefits while maintaining an exceptional safety profile, minimising undesirable effects on both humans and the environment.
A prime example of this approach is the evolution of the Tween™ 20 surfactant, a benchmark adjuvant. This has led to the creation of two new families of adjuvants, based on safe and effective polysorbate technology. Each family contains multiple variants tailored to specific formulation needs, providing a wider spectrum of performance improvements.
Can you brief us about Croda’s technical centres and capabilities?
As a leader in innovative crop protection formulation and delivery solutions, Croda has five dedicated crop formulation technical centres located in the US, Europe, Brazil, India and China. These provide an integrated network to deliver dedicated customer technical support in addition to innovative new product development, formulation development and adjuvancy performance testing. Each of these is fully equipped with an extensive range of test capabilities for formulation development and characterisation, including milling, extrusion, particle size, contact angle and viscosity measurement, stability and Franz cell leaf permeation studies.
Globally, Croda has established specific “centres of excellence” to address more highly specialised aspects of adjuvant development. These include a unique spray quality assessment laboratory in the US housing a unique and patented low-speed wind tunnel and single droplet generator partnered with advanced analytical technology. It is used to accurately characterise spray quality, droplet size distribution, and detailed droplet behaviour for the purpose of improving on-target delivery and minimising off-target spray drift.
Croda’s specialised laboratory development capabilities also include an advanced Product Validation Centre in Brazil to enable the comparative assessment of adjuvant technologies in soil and foliar applications. Additional capabilities include a biostimulant testing facility in the UK located on the grounds of a prominent agricultural research institute.
More recently, microbiology laboratory facilities have been added to meet the growing need for biological formulations, including microbial viability, compatibility and shelf-life / stability studies. In addition, Croda has also developed plant and crop biology facilities to enable laboratory and greenhouse trials for product development and evaluation.
What are the most significant formulation challenges currently faced in the development of agrochemicals/biologicals? How does Croda overcome these challenges?
In recent years, one of the most notable trends has been the growing market demand for biological products, including both live microbes and microbially-derived actives. While once considered almost exclusively the domain of organic farming, biologicals are increasingly recognised as an important technology to complement conventional synthetic active ingredients as part of an integrated pest management programme. As such, Croda has seen a surge in demand for formulation support in biological and specifically microbial product development.
While most biological products typically need a number of the more common formulation components already used in conventional products, such as dispersants, rheology modifiers and emulsifiers, there are often additional requirements given microbial pesticide product sensitivity to heat, light, moisture and harsh processing conditions. In addition, many biologically-derived actives are more sensitive to ingredient compatibility and impurity levels, hence the need for additional testing and evaluation. Other factors to consider include microbial viability for living organisms along with shelf-life and stability issues, which may have a significant impact on overall product performance.
At Croda, we have developed products, formulations and test methods specifically designed to address the challenges of biologics products. Atlox™ BS-50, a ready-to-use WP delivery system, has been designed to improve the wettability of solid microbial systems. Water- and preservative-free OD chassis formulations have been developed to extend shelf-life and maintain microbial viability, while incorporating built-in adjuvants for penetration enhancement and improved spray retention. To complement these, we have also established new microbiological test facilities, including viability and vigour assays to optimise shelf-life, storage and delivery conditions.
How is the formulation process designed to achieve a balance between efficacy, safety and environmental impact?
There are various strategies to achieve this, one of which involves the use of adjuvants. The flexibility of adjuvants allows for a balance between efficacy, safety, and environmental impact, tailored to the desired outcome. Two example areas where adjuvants can make a significant difference include:
- Optimising spray quality – Spray quality refers to the droplet size distribution produced by a spray nozzle. It is crucial that these droplets are the right size for maximum effectiveness. Good spray quality enhances precision targeting, increases crop coverage (improving efficacy), and reduces wastage and off-target drift (minimising environmental impact). Adjuvants like Croda’s Atplus™ DRT-EPS combine the benefits of a non-ionic surfactant with an effective drift control agent. This enables better biological efficacy while controlling the environmental risks associated with spray drift.
- Reducing active ingredient loading – Croda has been investigating the potential to reduce active ingredient levels while maintaining efficacy through the use of adjuvants. In a recent case study, a 500 g/L terbuthylazine formulation was diluted to 25% of its standard rate. By incorporating Atplus™ UEP-100, the herbicidal performance matched that of the full-strength formulation. This demonstrates the powerful role adjuvants can play in achieving the right balance between efficacy, safety, and environmental sustainability.
In your opinion, what competitive advantages does Croda possess compared to other companies offering similar adjuvants and formulation services?
While Croda is renowned for its comprehensive range of additives and adjuvants for a wide range of formulation types, this is only one of the significant benefits that we provide for our customers. With a well-established reputation for customer education and training developed over many years, we have extensive online formulation resources available and regularly provide workshops, seminars, hands-on laboratory sessions, customer visits and one-to-one support to build strong customer relationships.
As a global supplier with manufacturing sites in different regions of the world, Croda offers increased supply chain resilience and security of supply for key ingredients across its major markets. We also have an extensive worldwide network of Croda sales representatives, enabling local company contact without the need for a complex third-party distribution network. When combined with the regional technical centres described above, delivering customer-specific formulation advice and expertise, this provides the basis for an unrivalled long-term partnership.
With sustainability and environmental concerns becoming increasingly important to our customers, Croda is proud to highlight its achievements and ongoing activities in the Sustainability area. From an intrinsic sustainability standpoint, the company has been at the forefront of developing bio-based and low carbon products to support customer decarbonisation goals. We are committed to decarbonising our operations and supply chains, aligning with verified Science-Based Targets (SBT) to deliver carbon-saving benefits to our customers. In 2024 we announced the availability of Product Carbon Footprints (PCFs) for materials produced across 12 of our global manufacturing sites. This initiative covers over 400 formulation aid and adjuvants for the agrochemical market.
Our innovative portfolio also delivers numerous extrinsic sustainability benefits to enhance formulation performance, including Hydravance™ adjuvants to increase soil penetration and Atplus™ DRT to reduce off-target spray drift.
In what ways can Croda assist companies seeking tailored formulation solutions? What are the different collaboration models that Croda offers?
At Croda, we offer a range of collaborative approaches to work with our customers, and we are highly flexible in tailoring these partnerships to suit their needs. The most common method is through Customer Work Requests (CWRs), which are initiated after discussions to thoroughly understand the customer’s unmet needs or specific requirements.
Once a CWR is raised, we work exclusively with the customer, using their supplied active ingredients to develop customised formulations. We conduct lab stability studies based on the Design of Experiment principles and ensure that the testing of formulations adheres to CIPAC standards for the parameters specified by the customer. Upon completion, we provide the customer with the final formulation, along with supporting stability data and testing results. Whenever possible or necessary, we invite customers to our laboratories for joint collaboration on CWRs. Similarly, we are also happy to work at customer facilities when needed to support joint development efforts. To maintain confidentiality, we sign non-disclosure agreements with all customers involved in CWRs, ensuring that all collaborative work remains secure and protected.
In addition to formulation development, our experienced synthesis and process optimisation teams are capable of customising existing products, such as low-moisture or demineralised options, and even synthesising new molecules to meet specific customer requirements.
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