Why biomanufacturing is gaining momentum
This article appeared in the April edition of Personal Care magazine. Republished with permission.
The personal care industry sits at a crossroads. Consumers are demanding more sustainable, transparent, and traceable ingredient stories, while regulators tighten the boundaries on what can be called ‘green’. Brand owners, formulators, and ingredient manufacturers are being pushed to rethink how materials are made and not just what they are made of.
For decades, efficiency was the dominant metric. Processes built on classical chemical catalysis delivered volume, reliability, and purity at a price point that fuelled global growth in cosmetics and personal care. Yet the same processes that established the industry’s success — high-temperature reactions, volatile feedstocks, and solvent-intensive separations — are now under increased scrutiny for their environmental impact.
The transition to cleaner, more efficient ingredient manufacturing is well underway on multiple fronts. Chemical routes are being optimized, and precision fermentation continues to evolve.
Biocatalysis, meanwhile, is being established as the pillar of industrial biotechnology, a bridge between chemistry and biology, with companies like enginzyme helping to redefine what bio manufacturing can mean for the personal care industry.
Demand for innovation has never been higher. Brands need differentiated textures, sensory profiles, and performance claims to stand out in saturated markets.
Industry leaders are looking beyond incremental formulation tweaks to fundamental manufacturing change. A 2024 Fact.MR survey found that more than three-quarters of personal care stakeholders plan to increase investments in biomanufacturing and green-chemistry innovation, reflecting a structural shift rather than a passing trend.
Traditional chemistry still provides scale, fermentation enables complexity, but biocatalysis f ills the gaps, combining precision, efficiency, and sustainability.
Chemical synthesis: a foundation under pressure
Classical chemistry remains the workhorse of personal care ingredient production. It underpins the synthesis of surfactants, emollient esters, silicones, UV filters, rheology modifiers, and conditioning agents, virtually every functional class in a formulation lab. At its heart lies a familiar repertoire of transformations, such as:
The traditional chemical toolkit has had time to evolve and deliver products that are safe, reproducible, and cost-effective at industrial scale. Catalysts and methods of optimisation and refinement of these processes lead to high yields and consistency. For bulk molecules, nothing yet competes with the throughput and robustness of chemical catalysis.
Chemical routes benefit from mature infrastructure. Plants are built for these reactions, supply chains are standardized, and decades of regulatory data exist. Raw materials such as fatty acids, alcohols, petrochemical intermediates are available globally. The unit operations are well understood, enabling tight process control and cost predictability.
Moreover, chemistry is flexible. By adjusting chain length, degree of saturation, or head-group substitution, chemists can fine tune performance attributes such as viscosity, mildness, or spreading. This combinatorial freedom has been essential to the diversity of modern cosmetic formulations.
However, these strengths come at an environmental and reputational cost. Many classical processes operate under harsh conditions — temperatures above 150°C, high pressures, and use corrosive or toxic compounds. Energy demand is significant, and atom economy is often poor, with side products requiring separation and disposal.
Ethoxylation, for example, is efficient in throughput but relies on ethylene oxide, a highly reactive gas with safety and toxicity concerns. The same reaction can generate 1,4-dioxane as an unwanted by-product, now under increasing regulatory pressure worldwide. Similarly, sulfation and sulfonation demand complex neutralization steps and produce salt-laden effluents that are difficult to treat.
Even where emissions are well controlled, public perception is shifting. ‘Petro-derived’, ‘sulfated’, or ‘quaternary’ have become warning signals in consumer communication, regardless of scientific nuance. This has motivated a wave of ‘sulfate-free’, ‘non-EO’, and ‘naturally derived’ product launches, all seeking to reconcile performance with perception.
To their credit, chemical manufacturers have made steady progress toward cleaner operations. Continuous-flow reactors reduce waste and improve safety; solid catalysts replace liquid acids; renewable feedstocks displace petroleum. Yet these can often be incremental improvements on processes that are inherently constrained by thermodynamics and stoichiometry.
At some point, further gains in sustainability or purity become disproportionately expensive. The industry is reaching that plateau, highly optimized, yet difficult to decarbonize. This has prompted formulators and suppliers to look to biology for the next leap forward.
Fermentation: A biotech revolution with limits
If classical chemistry built the industry, fermentation gave it a new language. Once limited to producing vitamins, organic acids, amino acids, and preservatives, microbial fermentation now supplies a growing range of cosmetic actives, texturizers, and lipids — from hyaluronic acid and ceramides to biosurfactants and ferment-derived squalane.
With advances in metabolic engineering, microorganisms can now convert sugars, glycerol, or plant oils into molecules once accessible only through complex chemical synthesis. The appeal is clear: renewable carbon in; high-value functionality out.
Fermentation aligns naturally with sustainability goals. It uses renewable feedstocks, creates complex molecules with ease, and offers powerful marketing narratives around ‘bio-derived’ and ‘clean beauty’.
However, industrial fermentation is energy intensive and capital heavy. Systems are often dilute and characterised by modest titres, making purification costly. Process rigidity is another constraint. Changing a fermentation product often requires reengineering the organism and revalidating the process, a far cry from the plug and-play flexibility of chemical synthesis.
The industry’s success stories illustrate both the power and the limits of fermentation.
Hyaluronic acid, once extracted from rooster combs, is now produced microbially at ton scale using Bacillus and Streptococcus strains. The environmental and ethical advantages are undeniable, yet production still involves costly purification to control molecular-weight distribution and endotoxin content.
Biosurfactants such as sophorolipids and rhamnolipids offer mildness and biodegradability unmatched by traditional surfactants. However, their titres are low, and foam stability issues have limited adoption beyond niche formulations.
Fermentation-derived squalane, produced from engineered yeast, has become a commercial success, a rare case where biotechnology achieved both performance and cost competitiveness. Its route benefited from high carbon efficiency and strong consumer resonance with ‘vegan squalane’.
These examples demonstrate that fermentation can absolutely succeed — but only under particular economic and compound-specific conditions.
For many high-volume ingredients, energy demand, purification footprint, and process inflexibility remain obstacles to broad replacement of classical chemistry.
Biocatalysis: bridging chemical and biological worlds
Between the precision of biology and the scalability of chemistry lies biocatalysis, the use of isolated enzymes to catalyse chemical reactions.
At its simplest, a biocatalyst replaces the traditional acid, base, or metal catalyst with an enzyme, a protein evolved to perform specific reaction extremely efficiently under mild conditions. In an era where the personal care ingredients industry is measured not only by yield but by carbon footprint and purity metrics, that specificity becomes a strategic advantage.
In contrast to chemical catalysts, which often generate unwanted isomers and by-products or require elevated temperatures and strong reagents, enzymes act selectively and gently, typically between 30–70°C and neutral pH. This reduces side-product formation and simplifies purification, cutting both waste and downstream cost. Bornscheuer and Kazlauskas (2019) describe this as “molecular surgery with biological precision.”
Enzymes are also renewable and biodegradable, eliminating heavy-metal residues and persistent catalyst waste. When combined with renewable fatty-acid or sugar feedstocks, biocatalytic routes can move an entire process several steps closer to the circular-carbon goal that personal care brands increasingly prioritize.
The range of chemistries accessible through enzymes is far broader than many realize. Those most relevant to personal care ingredient manufacturing include:
In short, biocatalysis extends far beyond ‘gentle esterification’: it is a platform chemistry, capable of producing surfactant backbones, emollients, wax analogues, aroma esters, and even active compounds with chirality or regio-specificity that traditional catalysis cannot easily reach.
While many personal care companies still view enzymes as niche, their commercial track record is quietly expanding.
Flavour and fragrance esters: Enzymatic synthesis of isoamyl laurate, benzyl benzoate, and linalyl acetate has been demonstrated at pilot and production scale with conversions >95% under solvent-free conditions (Hyla et al, 2025).
Besides lower energy input, these processes deliver cleaner odour profiles because there are fewer side products.
Structured lipids and MCTs: Food-industry experience has proven that immobilized lipases can effectively convert fatty-acid streams into tailored triglycerides. The same logic applies to cosmetic emollients, providing inspiration and confidence for personal-care manufacturers.
Biobased surfactant intermediates: Enzyme catalysed amidation of fatty methyl esters with sarcosine or amino acids avoids chlorinated intermediates, yielding mild amphoterics with improved biodegradability (Tripathy et al, 2018).
Chiral actives and fine chemicals: In pharma and fragrance sectors, alcohol dehydrogenases and transaminases have become routine for producing single-enantiomer alcohols and amines at multi-ton scale. These same enzymes can produce fragrance alcohols such as citronellol and menthol analogues with precise stereochemistry (Bornscheuer 2023 review).
Each of these examples underscores a pattern: when enzymes are properly integrated into industrial workflows, they can match or exceed the efficiency of conventional catalysis while cutting environmental impact.
Biocatalysis still underused, but hurdles can be surmounted
Yet despite compelling examples, biocatalysis remains underused in personal-care manufacturing. Some of the hurdles that have limited broader deployment include:
A combination of enzyme immobilization, engineering, and process optimization can overcome many of these limitations, often entirely. On an economic level, cost parity with traditional catalysts is now realistic. Modern immobilized enzymes offer extensive reuse, bringing effective catalyst costs in line with chemical methods once energy and waste-treatment savings are included.
Companies like enginzyme, with integrated R&D spanning enzyme design, efficient and general immobilization technology, and process development, are accelerating industrial adoption of enzymatic manufacturing.
A common misconception is that adopting enzymes requires radical process redesign. In practice, biocatalysis can often fit into existing chemical infrastructure. Stainless-steel stirred tank reactors, and even fixed-bed columns, can host enzymatic steps with zero or just minor modifications.
Generally, mild optimum temperatures for biocatalytic processes further improve integration into production of heat-sensitive intermediates where classical chemistry would cause substantial degradation of substrates or products. In turn, while sustainability headlines often dominate, practitioners emphasize other tangible benefits:
These operational gains translate directly into competitive advantage, especially for mid-sized ingredient manufacturers seeking differentiation without capital-intensive plant overhauls.
Taken together, these developments, benefits and limitations position biocatalysis not as a full replacement for chemistry or fermentation but often as an alternative, a platform that when applied wisely combines the reliability of chemical manufacturing with the precision and selectivity of biology. It leverages existing assets while unlocking creative new molecules.
The next era of ingredient manufacturing
At enginzyme, we take biocatalysis beyond confinement to single reactions by embedding it throughout process design, from early intermediate synthesis to late-stage finishing, forming the invisible backbone of next-generation plants that would consume less energy, produce less waste, and generate high quality products.
The industry has the tools to make biocatalysis a standard part of manufacturing practice. Companies that embrace this shift early will not only meet sustainability targets but will be able to create new ingredient classes and fresh market narratives built on precision, efficiency, and authenticity.
The future of personal care manufacturing will not belong solely to chemists or biologists, but to those who master both.
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