Pilani however, refutes the charges strongly saying that it has been proved that sodium benzoate is the most safest of preservative in the market. All multinationals use the product, which also goes in beverages like Pepsi, Coca Cola and other processed foods. Sodium benzoate, which is a Class-II preservative, has an advantage that it is not retained in the body.

The demand for food additives should have been much higher, says Pilani as India is a tropical country with its own set of problems. Adoptingunhygienic storage procedures has resulted in lower shelf life of the agro produce. Processed food industry offers a huge potential for the products, however, there are many products in the market that are being sold with no preservatives. Though well known companies are using the product, consumption of the products (processed food like sauce, fruit pulps) from the smaller ones is resulting in problems of food poisoning.

Local sales of the company for sodium benzoate is to the tune of 80-90 tonnes per month, while the company exports around 350-400 tonnes per month. With increase in exports of food products as well as processed foods, the company hopes to do well in the domestic market too. However, it is continuing to focus on the export market and for which the company is expanding its capacity and add a new processing unit to cater to the American market, which uses the product in a different specification.

Another problem faced by the food additive industry is that of the low quality of materialavailable in the market, which is produced mainly by small scale manufacturers. These producers manufacture sodium benzoate from methyl benzoate route, a by-product in the production of dimethyl terephthalate (DMT). Methyl benzoate is available at a very low price of around Rs 6 per kg, hence the small producers are able to sell sodium benzoate at around Rs 23-25 per kg, as against Rs 33-35 per kg by Ganesh Benzoplast, who manufactures it through the benzoic acid route.

The sodium benzoate produced by the small scale producers has many toxic impurities such as toluic acid, unreacted xylene among other chemicals. It does not take much to get the IP certification and launch the product in the market. As a result of these practices, Ganesh Benzoplast is unable to sell its products through dealers, who generally prefer to take the material from small producers. However, the quality-conscious multinationals prefer to use the material supplied by Ganesh Benzoplast. In fact the company has recently been approvedas the world supplier to Coca Cola and has bagged tenders in Egypt, South Africa and Thailand apart from being their supplier in India.

Gold Benzoplast to relaunch fish preservative

The fish preservative `Preserfish' a combination of sodium benzoate and fumaric acid, produced by Ganesh Benzoplast, is being relaunched in the market. The product which was introduced in the market to increase the shelf life of the fish from 3-4 days to 15 days has not met with the success the company was expecting.

The problem lay in the fact that `Preserfish' was an ice additive and had to be added to ice rather than sprinkled on the fish directly. This involved selling the product to the ice factory as well as selling the concept to the fishermen and the final users. With the price differential between normal ice and `Preserfish-ice' clearly visible the company was losing out on sales.

To address the problem Ganesh Benzoplast plans to relaunch the product, where `Preserfish' can be sprinkled directly on thefish, rather than on the ice. Though ice will still be required to store the fishes, the company will have to sell the product only to the users. The cost involved to the user is 10 paise per kg of fish stored. The company, which has filed a patent for the product, had to change the formulation from a soluble preservative to a non-soluble one. Since both the chemicals involved -- sodium benzoate and fumaric acid, are approved by the drug authority and are not retained in the body, consumption of `Preserfish' is harmless.

Meanwhile the company is exporting the product to Venezuela, Sri Lanka and Dubai and has got approvals for exporting the product to Thailand. Ganesh Benzoplast is also contemplating to use the `Preserfish' technology for storing meat, beef for which it is conducting trials at veterinary colleges.