SCI’s CEO, Sharon Todd, talks to Croda CEO, Steve Foots, about 100 years of chemistry and business innovation.
Croda’s history stretches back 100 years to when an entrepreneur called Crowe and a chemist called Dawe blended their surnames to come up with an identity for their new business, refining wool grease from the Yorkshire wool trade into lanolin.
It’s a product the company still makes and even today the company’s headquarters are close to its roots, in a stately home not far away from the village in Yorkshire, UK, where it was established.
What has certainly changed is the scale of the operation. The company has grown significantly over the years and now has over 6000 staff, most of whom (around 5000) are based outside of the UK, spread across 94 sites in 37 countries.
Croda has become a global speciality chemicals company selling thousands of ingredients to thousands of customers – 16,000 in 2024 – with a focus on beauty, pharmaceuticals and agriculture. It’s a member of the London FTSE 100 and racked up revenue of £1.6bn in 2024.
‘100 years is a massive milestone for the company. The thread through the last 100 years has been growth, innovation and sustainability,’ says Croda’s CEO Steve Foots.
‘There’s a consistency around our core competencies. Strategy is about really knowing what you are good at and how you accentuate that strength. In Croda it’s always around science and innovation – that entrepreneurial spirit to create; around sustainability leadership – giving a positive impact; and around customer intimacy – really knowing your customers,’ he says.
Consistency is also core to the company’s culture: Foots is only the seventh CEO in 100 years, and Danuta Gray is the ninth Chair of the company’s Board. Foots joined Croda as a graduate trainee in 1990 and has held a number of senior management positions since, becoming president of Croda Europe in 2010 and the company’s group CEO in 2012.
‘We’ve changed a little bit, we’ve got bigger, but our roots are just the same,’ he says.
The company has been through a number of stages of development since it started selling that first product. It expanded into the US in the 1950s, and followed that with organic growth in the 1970s and 1980s which saw Croda diversify into manufacturing paints, printing inks, adhesives and dyestuffs alongside chemicals. At one point it even became a major processor of honey.
This was followed in more recent years by a renewed focus on speciality chemicals, and most recently with acquisitions to boost the company’s pharma business, including Brenntag Biosector and Avanti Polar Lipids – which led to an agreement with Pfizer to supply novel excipients for the first mRNA Covid-19 vaccine. It has also expanded its focus on the high-growth fragrance market with the acquisition of Iberchem.
Croda's headquarters, Yorkshire, UK
‘Our job at its heart is taking natural ingredients and creating real value out of them and the recent portfolio restructuring was a big pivot, moving away from our industrial heritage to more fast-growing markets like beauty, pharmaceutical and agrochemicals,’ he explains.
Sustainable ingredients like lanolin might have been key to Croda’s creation but they are also a competitive differentiator today when it comes to customer demand, Foots says.
‘If you offer a product to a customer that has great innovation and it’s got wonderful sustainability credentials – lower carbon or lower impurities – then it’s much more powerful than having one of those two,’ he argues. ‘We think absolutely it’s a real value driver, but you have to be focused on sustainability and innovation.’
What’s also clear is that Croda is a survivor: when it listed on the UK stock market in 1964 there were 35 other chemical companies. None of them, apart from Croda, still exist in their original form.
‘It’s a reminder to us that if you keep static and you don’t change, then you won’t be around. It’s challenging at the moment for the industry, but the industry will survive – some companies will become stronger and some will be weaker. How you make sure you are on the right side of that is key,’ says Foots.
Chemistry is an industry of industries he says, in that it’s supplying every other industry. But it has to reimagine itself. ‘I think the next 10-20 years needs virtually every organisation in the chemical sector to reimagine itself. If it just sticks to doing what it’s done in the last 20 years, I think it will struggle,’ he warns.
Part of Croda’s longevity is down to the company’s ability to disrupt and reinvent itself, as evidenced by its evolving strategy through the decades. ‘It’s much better to disrupt yourself before somebody else does. We are constantly thinking about being in the right markets, with the right technologies,’ he says.
In its most recent annual report, the company noted that customer appetite for innovation had dipped during the pandemic, but that this has now returned. Croda is expanding its innovation pipelines, with new and protected products growing to 35% of its total sales. The company’s intellectual property portfolio includes over 1700 patents across more than 285 patent families.
‘We always think: Are we in the right markets for the future? Will customers pay for our innovation? And are there enough niches in those markets for Croda to outperform? What we never want to be in is the mass market of our main industries, we want to be in the specialised areas,’ Foots says.
‘We made a good decision to scale down our industrial footprint and put all of our brainpower into beauty, pharma and agriculture because we think over the next decade, they will outperform other industries,’ he says.
‘The next five years is about fast growth in these markets: we don’t need big portfolio change, we just need strong delivery now, in many ways it’s about execution.’
Right now, one area of potential innovation is artificial intelligence. ‘I think those organisations that truly embrace new technologies like AI and embed that in their organisations to create more agile working and more dynamic organisations with more predictive data will be big winners. The pace at which AI is moving now is really exciting,’ he says.
Croda is perhaps unusual in that it’s a distributor, a manufacturer and a creator of new chemistries all at the same time.
Unlike others in the sector, Croda operates flexible manufacturing sites, rather than large continuous operation plants. And it produces its high-end ingredients in test tube quantities rather than tanker loads. This means it is in constant contact with its customers and understanding their needs is a key part of its innovation cycle.
‘A lot more of our innovation will come from individual programmes with customers, particularly the local and smaller customers, and medium sized customers that are growing at a fast rate,’ says Foots.
As for Croda in another 100 years? ‘I’d like it to be independent and valuable in the true sense of a rich experience for people; the barometer for the industry that people want to join because they get good development and a really fulfilling career,’ Foots says.
‘Our purpose is “Smart science to improve lives”. Virtually all our growth in the future will be because of our creativity in our smart science. It’s not just smart science in launching a brand new product, it’s solving the next problem of a process at the factory or providing a product with a lower carbon footprint. If we can continue to innovate we can continue to drive value for our customers’, he says.
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