India has just harvested a record 55.093 million tonnes of maize, 27% more than the year before, and spot prices have spent months below the support price (Rs 2,400 a quintal for this crop; Rs 2,410 for the 2026-27 season). The obvious question is what else the crop could become. Ethanol already takes about 12.8 million tonnes of it. The fashionable answer is cosmetics: hyaluronic acid, the humectant in half the serums on a chemist’s shelf, is made by fermenting glucose, and glucose comes from maize starch.

This piece works through the arithmetic of that idea, for hyaluronic acid and for the other ingredients a maize wet mill could feed. The short version: the chemistry works, the volumes do not. Cosmetic ingredients are worth a great deal per tonne and consume almost no grain. Treating them as an outlet for a maize surplus is a category error — but treating them as an import-substitution target is not.

Is there a surplus, and of what?

The crop is genuinely large. The Agriculture Ministry’s third advance estimate for 2025-26 puts maize at 55.093 million tonnes against 43.409 million the previous year, a rise of 11.7 million tonnes. Average spot prices in the major producing states in May 2026 ran between Rs 17,950 and Rs 21,000 a tonne, by the United States Department of Agriculture’s India office, roughly 19% below the minimum support price. The USDA office raised its estimate of India’s maize exports for the year to 2.4 million tonnes and cut imports to 50,000 tonnes. Cheap maize, moving out of the country: that is what a surplus looks like.

But the surplus that matters for a fermentation business is not grain. India’s distilleries offered oil marketing companies 1,776 crore litres of ethanol for the 2025-26 supply year against a requirement of about 1,050 crore litres, so roughly 726 crore litres of capacity had no buyer. The spare asset is fermenter volume and the starch-to-glucose plant in front of it, not the maize. A tonne of grain can be bought by anyone; a sterile, instrumented fermenter with a trained crew cannot.

Maize’s existing industrial uses show the same thing. An ANGRAU market outlook puts the split at about 54% poultry and animal feed, 25% ethanol, 14% starch and 7% food. Starch is the entry point for everything in this piece.

Hyaluronic acid: the chemistry is easy, the scale is tiny

Hyaluronic acid (HA) is a long sugar chain — a polysaccharide — that holds water, which is why it turns up in serums, eye drops and joint injections. It used to be extracted from rooster combs. Since the 1980s it has been made by fermentation: a bacterium is fed glucose and secretes HA, which is then precipitated, filtered and dried.

Published yields are consistent. A 2023 study of Streptococcus zooepidemicus, the industrial workhorse, reported 0.19 grams of HA per gram of glucose in batch fermentation. A 2016 paper on an engineered Corynebacterium glutamicum, a safer organism with no toxins, reported 0.22 g/g. Allowing for purification losses, this piece assumes 0.15 grams of saleable HA per gram of glucose, and 0.65 tonnes of glucose from a tonne of maize. Both are this blog’s assumptions, not plant figures.

That gives about 98 kg of hyaluronic acid per tonne of maize. Now set it against demand. Frost & Sullivan forecasts global sales of HA raw material at about 1,285 tonnes in 2026. At 98 kg a tonne, the entire world’s supply would come out of 13,179 tonnes of maize — 0.024% of India’s crop, or about 1026 tonnes for a respectable 100-tonne-a-year plant. A single mid-sized distillery eats more grain in a week.

The value runs the other way. A customs record from March 2024 shows cosmetic-grade HA powder landing from China at about $86.75/kg; a 2025 market report puts Chinese cosmetic-grade export prices at $65–200/kg and pharmaceutical grade above $1,100/kg. At the import price, the HA from one tonne of maize is worth about Rs 744,315, against Rs 26,167 as ethanol — roughly 28 times more.

That multiple is seductive and mostly meaningless, because the grain is not the cost. Making a kilogram of HA needs about 6.7 kg of glucose; at Rs 40 a kilo that is Rs 267, or about 3% of what the kilogram sells for. Everything else — the fermenter, the sterile air, the precipitation solvent, the drying, the testing — is the business. In ethanol it is the other way round: maize at the May spot price is about 74% of the revenue from the ethanol it yields. Ethanol is a grain business with a factory attached. Hyaluronic acid is a factory business with a little grain attached.

Which is why a cheap maize crop is close to irrelevant to whether India makes its own HA, and why China’s dominance is not about corn. China supplied 82% of world output in 2021, with Bloomage Biotech alone at 44%; the top four suppliers by volume were all Chinese. Bloomage says its fermentation yield went from under 3 g/L when it started in 2000 to 12–14 g/L. That is two decades of strain and process work, not a feedstock advantage.

What India buys, and who in India makes it

India’s HA imports are hard to size because they share a customs line with everything else in the natural-polymer basket. India imported $71.9 million of goods under HS 391390 in 2024, 11,338 tonnes in all, half of it by value from China. Most of that tonnage is xanthan gum at about $2.50/kg; HA arrives in 50- and 100-kilogram lots at eighty-odd dollars a kilo. A separate eight-digit code for hyaluronic acid would make the number knowable; there is not one.

There is Indian activity, all of it small and recent:

• Cosmos Bio, incubated at C-CAMP in Bengaluru, makes recombinant ectoine and hyaluronic acid and has taken BIRAC and Karnataka state grants.
• Cellarim Labs markets a cell-free HA, made with enzymes rather than live cells, which it describes as India’s first.
• Stelis Biopharma holds an Indian patent, granted in 2020, on producing sodium hyaluronate by fermenting a Streptococcus strain free of hyaluronidase activity.
• A northern-region science and technology cluster reports scaling a non-pathogenic Bacillus-based HA process from laboratory proof to pilot readiness.

Several Indian websites advertise themselves as HA “manufacturers”; the listings carry the HS code for imported polymer and prices from Rs 200 to Rs 10,000 a kilogram, which is the spread of a trading business, not a plant. A market study of the Asia-Pacific region describes India as structurally import-dependent for all but the lowest cosmetic grades, importing bulk powder and doing the formulation locally. This piece found no evidence of commercial-scale Indian HA fermentation.

The rest of the menu, ranked by what it would actually absorb

Hyaluronic acid is the glamorous end of a long list. The same glucose stream feeds a dozen ingredients that go into cosmetics and personal care, and the cheaper ones consume real tonnage.

The maize column is the tonnage behind 10,000 t of product, and the last column the revenue from one tonne of maize. Both use this blog’s assumed 0.65 t of glucose per tonne of maize and the literature yields in the builder; they are indicative. Prices are India import or export unit values for 2024, except hyaluronic acid (a March 2024 shipment) and erythritol (Chinese market price).

Read the table from the bottom up. Hyaluronic acid pays Rs 744,315 a tonne of maize and will never take more than a few thousand tonnes of grain. Xanthan gum and lactic acid pay far less per tonne but could absorb tens of thousands. Citric acid is the volume story: India imported 141,747 tonnes in 2024, worth $105.2 million, and 95% of it came from China. Replacing that import alone would take roughly 290,763 tonnes of maize — still under half a per cent of the crop, but twenty times what the world’s hyaluronic acid needs, and against a competitor whose capacity the European Commission says grew by 780,000 tonnes between 2019 and 2025.

Sorbitol shows what India can already do. Gulshan Polyols runs 72,000 tonnes a year of it at Jhagadia, integrated from maize through starch and dextrose, and India exported $61.0 million of sorbitol in 2024. It is a humectant in toothpaste and creams, it is made from maize glucose, and nobody calls it a cosmetics breakthrough.

What stands in the way

Purity, not yield. Cosmetic grade is a powder specification. Injectable grade is a sterile, endotoxin-controlled, pharmacopoeia-compliant product, and that is where the price is: Chinese pharmaceutical-grade HA sells above $1,100/kg against $65–200 for cosmetic. The organism choice follows from this. Streptococcus zooepidemicus is an animal pathogen that makes toxins; engineered Bacillus subtilis and Corynebacterium glutamicum are endotoxin-free and are what the newer processes use, including India’s pilot work.

The price has already fallen. The oversupply is on the other side. Bloomage’s revenue fell 11.6% in 2024 and its net profit by about 72%, its worst year since listing. Chinese cosmetic-grade HA at $65/kg is a fraction of the Rmb 2,226 a kilogram that Huaxi Biotech’s 2019 prospectus recorded. An Indian entrant arrives into a market where the incumbent has spare capacity and nothing to lose by cutting price — the pattern this blog found in lysine, and again in erythritol, where Chinese capacity reached 380,000 tonnes and the price fell from about Rmb 40,000 a tonne to under Rmb 10,000.

The rules are thin. Cosmetics are regulated under the Cosmetics Rules, 2020, administered by the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation. An ingredient sold for injection is a drug and faces a different regime entirely. A market study notes that CDSCO has no specific monograph for hyaluronic acid, so importers work to the general Drugs and Cosmetics Act requirements.

There is a policy hook, and it is not about maize. The BioE3 policy, approved in August 2024, names bio-based chemicals, biopolymers and enzymes as one of six priority areas, and the department has set up biofoundries and pilot-scale biomanufacturing hubs for exactly this gap between a laboratory result and a plant. The shortlist of bio-based chemicals it is funding as import substitutes — itaconic acid, succinic acid, squalene, rhamnolipids — is a cosmetics-ingredient list in all but name. Squalene and rhamnolipids go straight into skincare and mild cleansers. Hyaluronic acid is not on the published shortlist.

What would fix this

Give hyaluronic acid its own eight-digit customs code. It currently shares HS 391390 with xanthan gum, alginates and laboratory reagents, so neither the volume nor the average price India pays can be read from the trade data. A separate code costs nothing and would tell a prospective investor the size of the market.

Target the fermenter, not the feedstock. Every incentive aimed at “value addition to maize” will be captured by ethanol, which is where the tonnage is. If the aim is cosmetic ingredients, the binding constraint is sterile fermentation capacity, downstream purification and endotoxin-grade quality systems — which is what the BioE3 biomanufacturing hubs are for, and what they should be measured on.

Add hyaluronic acid, and the cosmetic polysaccharides generally, to the published bio-based chemicals shortlist, or say why they were left off. The policy already funds squalene and rhamnolipids for the same end market.

Put the idle distillery capacity to the test before building anything new. About 726 crore litres of ethanol capacity had no buyer this year. Some of that plant is glucose-ready and could run contract fermentation for lactic acid, xanthan or citric acid, where India imports at known volumes and prices. That is a smaller claim than “cosmetics from the maize surplus”, and a testable one.

These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.

What this piece could not establish

The conversion yields are from published laboratory and process literature, not from any operating Indian plant, and the recovered hyaluronic acid yield of 0.15 g per g of glucose, the 0.65 tonnes of glucose per tonne of maize, and the Rs 40 a kilogram glucose price are this blog’s assumptions. Change them and the rupee-per-tonne figures move, though not by enough to alter the ranking. India’s hyaluronic acid imports could not be separated from the rest of HS 391390, so the $86.75/kg price comes from two individual shipment records in March 2024 rather than an annual average, and the quantity imported is unknown. The global HA tonnage is a consultancy forecast, not a measured figure, and the grade split behind it dates from 2021. No Indian commercial HA fermentation plant was found, but absence of evidence here is not proof; the companies named are at pilot or early commercial stage and their capacities were not published. Prices for alkyl polyglucosides and 1,3-propanediol are international reference levels, not Indian landed costs. The 2025-26 maize production figure is an advance estimate, not a final one, and the ethanol diversion figure is a projection.

Sources and caveats

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.