Business View - October 2015 85
cals. The company’s production facilities feature a large
manufacturing plant, two fully equipped development
labs, and a 15,000 square-foot warehouse. Along with
organic reactions, NFC can perform distillation, solvent
recovery, filtration, drying, and several unique finishing
steps as well.
According to Jay Dickson, about half of the company’s
business is making its own products and the other half
is “tolling.” He explains, “Tolling, in the chemical world,
is when a chemical company has need for a specialty
chemical and knows how to make it, but it doesn’t have
the capability to produce it, or it doesn’t want to spend
the money producing it. In this case, they go to another,
usually smaller company to produce the specialty chem-
ical. Typically, the larger company provides the process
and purchases the raw materials; then, the smaller com-
pany ‘toll’ produces the desired chemical for the larger
company.”
Dickson says that a typical tolling customer for NFC would
be “any of the large chemical companies with operations
in the USA. We produce for almost all of them. They are
all niche products; we really do not make one particu-
lar line of products. A customer can come to us and it
could be the oddest, most unique product in the world.
If we think we have the capability to manufacture it, then
we’ll accept the project. Our primary capabilities are engi-
neering and manufacturing. We’re not an R&D company;
we’re not developing new products, and we’re not scour-
AT A GLANCE
WHO:
Nation Ford Chemical
WHAT:
Manufacturer of specialty chemicals and
intermediates
WHERE:
Fort Mill, South Carolina
WEBSITE
:
MANUFACTURING
