Our Legacy | Cerigo Additives Pvt. Ltd.

In 1995 Miheer Chinai built a plant at Taloja, outside Mumbai, to make a molecule that at the time came almost entirely from Europe. The joint venture, with Rohm & Haas and Nipa, was Chinai Chemicals, later renamed Novacel Life Sciences.

What made it unusual was where it started. The plant began at phthalic anhydride and ran through to the registered active without the material leaving the site. Almost nobody outside Europe was integrated that deeply.

Continuous process. Tube reactors. Distributed control system.

Quality Control Lab, Taloja, 1995

Miheer Chinai, Chairman

The Exit

In 2007 the plant and its registration passed to one of the industry's largest producers.

"We could see benzisothiazolinone turning into a commodity faster than the phthalic route could follow. What we had built was a method, and a method outlasts a molecule anyone can make."

Why Now

Integration at that depth matters again. Second sourcing has become a requirement rather than a preference, and a second source only counts if it goes deep enough to be genuinely independent. Starting at the building block is what gets it there.

Cerigo was founded in 2015. Its plant was specified for hazardous work from the start, because the people specifying it had run it before. The core chemistry has not changed. What has changed is that more than one route now runs into it, one of them from phthalic anhydride, as in 1995.

Glass-lined and stainless steel reactors, with dedicated gas dosing. High vacuum distillation and thin film evaporation. Sulfur dioxide, mercaptans, thiophenols and chlorine handled as standard.

The first plant made an active and stopped there. This one carries a project from route definition through to the formulated end-use system, and recovers its own acid by-products back into the process.

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Closing Band

Both times the point was the same: to make here what this industry imported. That is the foundation. The vision is to keep innovating beyond, into chemistry nobody has built yet.

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Proven Chemistry, Extended

The First Plant

The Exit

Why Now

Closing Band