Producer
SNF Group (SNF Floerger)
SNF Group (Andrezieux-Boutheon, Loire, France; private; Chairperson Evelyne Spiegel; ~€4B revenue) is the world's largest polyacrylamide and polyacrylate polymer producer — dominant in water treatment, oil and gas enhanced recovery, and mining flocculant applications. SNF produces carbomer-equivalent polyacrylate polymers in its specialty polymer portfolio for personal care and pharmaceutical applications. SNF operates more than 30 manufacturing sites globally including plants in France (Andrezieux-Boutheon headquarters plant), USA (Riceboro GA), China, and India. SNF's polyacrylate capacity is primarily focused on industrial (water treatment, EOR) grades rather than pharmaceutical-grade carbomers — but the company's scale means it has production capacity that could be adapted. Market share in pharmaceutical-grade carbomers is much smaller than Lubrizol.
1
Inputs supplied
1
Goods downstream
1
Facilities
0
Stories
What they make
1 input SNF Group (SNF Floerger) supplies
Click an input to see every good that depends on it, every country that produces it, and every other company in the supply chain.
Where it shows up
Goods downstream
Essential goods that depend on something SNF Group (SNF Floerger) makes — pick one to see the full supply chain.
What else they do
Business segments
The company's full revenue map — where this supply-chain role fits within their broader business.
Water Treatment Polymers
40%Oil & Gas Enhanced Recovery (EOR)
30%Paper & Industrial Processes
20%Specialty Polymers (Carbomers & Personal Care)
10%
Intelligence
What's known
Sourced claims about this company's role in supply chains — chokepoints, concentration, incidents, dual-use connections.
Did you know2023
SNF's polyacrylamide is added to municipal drinking water treatment plants to coagulate and settle suspended particles before filtration — the polymer enables cities to produce clean drinking water from river and lake sources. The same polyacrylamide chemistry (at different molecular weights and ionic charge densities) is injected into mature oil reservoirs as "polymer flooding" — EOR technology that thickens injected water to improve its displacement efficiency, recovering oil that would otherwise be left behind after conventional waterflooding. SNF's product simultaneously purifies the water supply chain (enabling drinking water production) and intensifies the fossil fuel supply chain (enabling additional crude oil recovery from mature reservoirs). The clean water infrastructure supply chain and the oil production supply chain both depend on polyacrylamide produced at the same Loire Valley, France headquarters facility. SNF's Georgia and China plants serve these two markets in parallel — the water utility in Atlanta and the oil operator in China's Daqing field both source from the same corporate family using fundamentally the same polymer chemistry for opposite environmental purposes.
SNF Group ↗Origin2023
SNF Group was founded in 1978 in Andrezieux-Boutheon, a small industrial town in the Loire department of France, by Evelyne Spiegel. The Loire Valley location had no particular chemical industry heritage that would predict a global polymer empire — but the region had access to chemical engineering talent from the universities of Saint-Etienne and Lyon. SNF grew through the 1980s and 1990s by focusing exclusively on polyacrylamide chemistry, building scale in a product that was essential across multiple industrial processes but had no single dominant supplier. By targeting water treatment, enhanced oil recovery, and mining all simultaneously, SNF grew faster than any single-market polymer supplier could. The company remains privately held and family-controlled (Evelyne Spiegel is Chairperson), with no debt or public equity, funding expansion entirely from operating cash flow. SNF's Riceboro, Georgia plant — opened in the early 1990s — gave it North American scale to supply the US oil patch's EOR polymer demand and US municipal water utilities simultaneously. A privately held French polymer company in a Loire valley town that nobody outside the water treatment and oil industry has heard of controls approximately 50% of global polyacrylamide capacity and influences the water that 100+ million people drink worldwide.
SNF Group ↗