Listen to Victoria and Jennifer Abril of SOCMA Here:
Amid a dynamic global landscape, the specialty chemical industry is navigating challenges and opportunities with “pragmatic confidence”. Join host Victoria Meyer and guest Jennifer Abril, CEO of SOCMA, as they explore the thriving specialty chemical industry and SOCMA’s pivotal role in fostering connections and collaboration. With a focus on domestic production, Jennifer discusses SOCMA’s initiatives to streamline business interactions, advance policy advocacy, and support supply chain adjustments in a changing world. The SOCMA theme, “Adapting Supply Chains for a Changing World,” highlights their commitment to advancing innovation and growth in North America.
Victoria and Jennifer discuss the current industry outlook, emphasizing the need for efficiencies and growth amidst global shifts. They discuss the intentional focus on onshoring and reshoring, reflecting the evolving supply chain dynamics. Jennifer also shares insights from SOCMA’s recent survey, revealing trends of optimism tempered with pragmatism. The episode offers a comprehensive overview of how SOCMA is driving North America’s positioning as a prime hub for specialty chemical manufacturing, underscoring the potential for growth and innovation in this resilient industry sector.
Join us on this week’s episode to learn more about these topics:
- SOCMA’s history and purpose
- North American chemical industry outlook: “Pragmatic Confidence”
- Purposeful localization and reshoring trends
- Regulatory and administrative challenges
- Industry networking and collaboration
Killer Quote: “We got to pragmatic confidence… there is confidence out there, but people are being extremely pragmatic about it. They are informed. They are watching, they are monitoring, and they know that they’re going to have to be agile and keep a very close eye to make those little tacks along the way, um, to make sure that they’re put, they’re still in a good position.” – Jennifer Abril
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Watch the Interview with Victoria and Jennifer Abril of SOCMA Here:
Reshoring And Innovation In Specialty Chemicals with SOCMA’s Jennifer Abril
Hi. Welcome back to The Chemical Show. I am here today with Jennifer Abrill, who is the CEO of SOCMA. I’m gonna let her describe that acronym.
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It’s been three days of great energy and conversations and topics about the specialty chemical industry. So Jennifer and I are gonna be talking about that and more. Jennifer, thanks for joining me.
Victoria, it’s great to be with you.
Absolutely. So let’s just start with a little bit about you. And then we’re gonna talk a little bit about SOCMA. So tell us about yourself.
Okay. Been in and around chemicals since 1997. I sort of fell into this industry after coming through more of a policy-based DC background. But I have been enjoying being part of the specialty chemical sector or any element of the broader specialty chemical sector for all of my career.
Yeah. How long have you been with SOCMA?
So this is my second tour of duty with SOCMA. I worked at SOCMA for three years earlier in my career, and I’ve been in this role for eight and a half years.
Awesome. That’s a long time. Tell us about what SOCMA is. I’m gonna proceed this with, I attended my first SOCMA show about three years ago, and I was like, wow. I was not even aware that this existed and that all of these companies engaged in the chemical industry existed and did what they did.
So tell us about SOCMA and its members.
Yeah. We’re an older association. I mean, we’re 104 years old. We’ve been around for a very, very long time. I think one of the fun things that we leaned into when we celebrated our hundredth anniversary, which unfortunately was during COVID, was the history of the organization. And so a fun fact is that our very first meeting was at the Hotel Washington in Washington DC, and our dinner speaker was Herbert Hoover when he was the secretary of commerce.
His pitch to us was we need to build a specialty chemical sector to feed our wartime efforts, and we need a single point of contact. So if you all could get yourselves organized around a trade group, that would be really helpful to the US government. Hence, trade associations were born.
That makes a lot of sense because I know that as an industry group you’re doing a lot to pull together the various points of view, be a single point of contact when it comes to policy and regulation and helping navigate the complex world that we’re in.
Yes, we’re doing all of that. And I think it’s so interesting that the impetus for the organization, was actually a call by the government to please organize yourselves. I have too many conversations with individual companies. Can you please get together and, you know, give us your collective point of view? And that ask has been prevalent all the way through.
Yeah, that’s awesome. And, for a hundred years, as you say. Of course, here we are in 2025, and the government’s view on maybe everything at the moment is a little different. So we’re gonna get into that a little bit later. Things are changing. So we’re sitting here at the SOCMA show just wrapping up what appears to be a really successful conference.
So talk to me about the SOCMA show and what it is and and how this manifests.
For a long time, SOCMA’s been involved in helping businesses find each other. So in the contract and toll space and the custom chemical space, there’s a lot of finding a needle in a haystack. Right? I need just the right partner who can do just the right work for me and on just the right time schedule. Our aim at SOCMA is to help bring down the number of Google searches that happen out there and to help people find each other faster, and we try to do that with curated services. We have a number of business services that help people do that on a regular basis. But it’s important that we also have an event where we can have the industry come together, and especially it helps at the beginning of the year when you’re really trying to make sure that you’ve got your your projects lined up and you’re trying to work on shoring up sourcing, that’s really important. So we really like having a Q1 event.
So it is a trade show, but we are injecting conference-like elements so we can bring the rest of what SOCMA works on, which is advocacy and safety performance and best practice sharing and business intelligence. All of that, we’re trying to infuse into the event.
Right, and 1,300 people this year. Is that what I heard?
1,300 people, yeah. It’s been terrific. We had a lot of growth this year. I think a lot of that has to do with interest in domestic production. Our aim as an organization is to grow the North American specialty chemical sector, and that’s what we’ve attempted to do here.
And you talked a little bit about the matchmaking. And I think one of the things that happens here, and for people that may or may not know, is a lot of the SOCMA members are custom manufacturers, toll manufacturers.
I’ve noticed a lot of engineering and instrumentation and other groups as well. But so many people that I talk to have said, we’re here looking for somebody that can help make a product that we wanna make, or they’re here finding somebody that helps fill up their assets. So it’s really unique in a different way. Because I think a lot of industry conferences are about speed dating and securing business for the future. But this happens in such a unique way.
Yeah, and thank you for noticing that. I was really touched by somebody who pulled me aside yesterday morning. It’s the first time she had been to this event, she’s been in and around the sector for thirty years, she told me. But what she complimented us on was the ability to have genuine conversations. She was saying that a lot of events she goes to, especially trade shows, have very much a sales energy. But this is a lot of collaboration, and it’s a lot of genuine conversation.
And we’ve worked really hard to put that part into this environment and to inject that. So it’s really less about the show, and it’s really about creating an environment where we can make sure those partnerships get done. And I just wanted to interject that, for the first time, we’ve actually rallied around a theme for this year. Usually, trade shows don’t carry themes, but we’re trying to inject a lot of what SOCMA does into this event as well so that we can make it more additive and value added. The theme that we chose, and it is appropriate, is adapting supply chains for a changing world.
Then we had three different subthemes underneath. One was around trying to understand new innovations and how is AI driving those. Another one is around policy changes.
A lot of those happening.
Yeah. And the third one is about regionalization, localization. What are the changing dynamics there? All of those things are top of mind, and it turned out to be really on target.
Absolutely, and I think that piece around localization is so critical, and it ties to that supply chain story. Across the chemical industry, as supply chains have gotten more expensive, have gotten longer, we’ve got all the uncertainties around what the tariff picture is. Creating resilient local supply chains business opportunities becomes really critical.
Absolutely. So one of the things that we have been tracking for the last few years is asking what part of your new inquiries or existing inquiries do you believe have to do with onshoring or reshoring efforts. It’s been really interesting because we’ve had anecdotal data, but we just did a survey going into this conference and asked again. And this is the first time we’ve really seen a lot of more of, the theme is very heavy on intentionality around localization and I know the last time we asked about this, there were some anecdotes that said, I think I’m getting new projects because of localization, but it might be that my customers aren’t telling me that’s the driver. It might be a new project that in other years, they might have shopped it to other geographies, but maybe they’re shopping it inside of North America now first.
But this year, when we asked again, we saw a jump in more purposeful localization. That has a lot to do with this changing supply chain and all the global dynamics that are happening.
Absolutely. I think what’s been interesting as well is when you look at the global chemical market, the US continues to be a bright spot, in terms of innovation and growth. I saw something in the Wall Street Journal this morning that just was talking about Germany, which Germany was really, in many ways, the European powerhouse for so many years for chemicals. And yet, what we’ve seen over the past year and more is continuous announcements of asset shutdowns and closures. I also think in the chemical industry, a lot of stuff is coming from China.
But I think what you talk about, this intentionality of onshoring and reshoring and localization It is a reflection of a global dynamic shift in chemical manufacturing.
That’s exactly right. So we’re looking at a changing world. Everything is in transition. If you go back ten years ago, the world had been pretty stable. So we knew where the supply chains were. Just in time was fine. The logistics, for the most part, were working. We were starting to see, pre-COVID, the idea of China plus one, dual sourcing, then everybody panicked during COVID. Then we had the inventory buildup and then the inventory drawdown.
It’s been a rough few years.
It has. We always try to pull on what’s the outlook for the year. And coming into this year, interestingly, the specialty chemical sector, at least the the people that we pull, they just have this underlying perennial optimism going on. I love that because each year, you come out of the gate thinking it’s gonna be a good year or we’re at least gonna be able to see some some pickup. And I think that has a lot to do with SOCMA members being so diversified too. That really helps when you have a variety of customers in lots of markets that are able to offset each other.
Yeah, and you shared earlier that you had coined a phrase coming out of your survey.
Yeah.
Can you share it with us?
Okay. So the the punchline is pragmatic confidence. So I’m gonna back into how we got to that.
Yeah, what does that mean?
Right. So I mentioned each year before we come to the show, we do a state of the industry report or an outlook report, and that’s the part that I deliver. So I deliver that on the first morning of the event. We ask all of the people that are in our show network as well as all of our members and other contacts that we have to participate in this outlook survey. And then I package that up, and I deliver that in the beginning of the event. It looks good this year. Ultimately, like I said, some of those things we’ve been tracking for a while are all very much pointed in growth mode.
Efficiencies and growth are really two trends that came through. How we got to pragmatic confidence is at the end of the survey, I asked an open-ended question. And we said, okay, last year’s phrase was cautious optimism. So if cautious optimism defined 2024, what word or phrase do you think describes 2025? And it was all over the map.
I literally had one person that said endless opportunity, and the very next person that took the survey said bleak.
So it went from one side of the coin to another. So what I did using AI because that’s the fun thing to do now, is I took all of those raw answers and I put it through chat GPT and said, what am I looking at? And it broke it up into categories for us. A good 15% of people were those super optimists, real strong optimists. And then another 25% were kind of the solid optimists Another 25% were kind of moderate growth, something that was a little bit more measured in their response.
And then we had a pretty good clip that said uncertainty. If you dig deeper, though, in the uncertain category, it really has nothing to do with people just having no idea what’s gonna happen. It’s really about, I’m not prepared to make a call because I see this happening, this happening, this happening, and this happening. Those things may be in conflict with each other, or there may be some issues that get in the way of what I’m hopeful for, which is a stronger business operating environment. So when you take all of that and kind of distill it down and we kept working on the language, where we landed was that there is confidence. There is confidence out there, but people are being extremely pragmatic about it.
They are informed. They are watching. They are monitoring, and they know that they’re gonna have to be agile and keep a very close eye to make those little tacks along the way to make sure that they’re still in a good position. We ended up with pragmatic confidence, which I think really underscores the general business climate.
I agree. And I think it also underscores the nature of this group of companies inside of SOCMA.
I think that it’s a good categorization of that. What can you share about the rest of the survey? Because I know you collected a lot of different information as you know, what two or three things stand out from that?
So the first thing we asked is coming into this year, what’s your growth outlook? 97% of the people that took the survey are either stable or greater than 5% growth. So it’s growth this year. Growth is expected only about 3%. But pragmatic growth.
Pragmatic growth. Up to 5% is not crazy.
It’s not crazy, but it’s incremental, and it’s reliable. But there’s still this hope underneath that all of the factors that are coming together will really create a surge. They are prepared and ready for it. They’re ready and waiting.
We also asked questions about adoption of technologies and automation. And so back to the efficiency question. There are a lot of people that when we asked last year, where were we on automation? A little less adoption. Technology adoption, I should say, we’re looking at that across a lot of different elements. But that also leads into the efficiency and the growth ideas. Other questions we asked were about mitigating risks. What are you doing to look at tariffs? Understanding where tariffs are? A number of different things. So, we’ll be publishing those results and putting them on LinkedIn.
Great, and can I get a copy of that? We’ll include the link to it in our show notes and on our website so people can easily access it.
Yeah, which will be great. And we do surveys throughout the year. A lot of things that are anecdotal because we’re trying to get a pulse, and we literally call them our pulse polls. So we do these surveys across the year about different things that come up.
Well and I’ve seen them come through. And what I appreciate about the surveys that you do is that they feel very real. Sometimes, you know, surveys come through and you’re like, oh gosh. I mean, who knows? But I think back to the whole pragmatic confidence that underpins SOCMA and its members, they’re pragmatic surveys as well to really assess what’s going on in business.
Yeah. I mean, we’re trying to be spot on to what is the driver? What do people need to know right now? A couple years ago, we were looking at destocking trends. So we were keeping track of those. So it’s really about what’s happening in business right now, and that can be additive to all of the economic indicators that people are reading.
Yeah. You touched on this as we talked about the survey. But when you think about the outloo for specialty and custom chemicals and manufacturing, what does that look like when we look into to 2025 and beyond?
So we’re working on something called SOCMA Vision 2030. And that is a belief and a strategy that we can position North America as the preferred geography for specialty chemical manufacturing. There are a lot of really positive things happening in The US or conditions here in The US, a stable business climate relatively speaking, with more business friendly advances to be made, strong energy and energy that is cost efficient. We have a strong workforce, high quality outputs, and we have open capacity. And so all of those things make The US or at least North America a really strong contender to be that central hub. And as I said earlier, that is our aim as an organization is to seize those opportunities.
I think that’s great. I’m looking forward to the outputs of that. One of the things you talked about, and I know you had an economist on stage as well today, talking about workforce development. So, obviously, it’s great to bring these roles. It’s great to grow the industry. And yet, it feels like when I talk to people, we’re still in a bit of a talent shortage.
The ability to attract people to the chemical industry, it can be tough at times. So there’s a reason that many of the people that are in the industry have parents that have been in the industry. There’s a lot of legacy that occurs. But I also know that SOCMA is really doing some work around, workforce development and supporting that. So what does that look like for you?
Yeah. Workforce development is such a large and perennial concern, for all of the industry sectors. I know my colleagues that work in other sectors are also talking about workforce. We want to be looking for what are the ways that we can alleviate those pain points around trying to find the headcount. Or what are the ways that we can get people up to speed faster?
So we’re trying to help employees work smarter, more efficiently, be more informed, have early warning systems, all of those things that the people who are actually in the companies doing the work, if we can create efficiencies or increase productivity, get them more knowledgeable, then that just helps the companies move faster. So we focus a lot around what are those opportunities. We’re really proud of one of the services that we have is a chemical operator training program. And about five years ago, we automated this. And then we really built it for kinda entry operators.
That is meant to provide a strong, stable, and consistent foundation to understand what a chemical operator needs to know. We really say that it’s built for day zero to the end of year two. So in the first two years, you really need to make sure that operator is fundamentally sound, and they’re gonna stay. Our program does not seek to kick out your own training program.
Because, yeah, people have custom programs in their businesses.
Right. Like, if we can take care of the foundation and the fundamentals and make sure that again, back to the industry needs consistency. So if we can do consistent training, then you can put your own company spin on that and that’s really important to us.
Makes sense. And then did I hear that you’re also looking to roll out something for somewhat more experienced employees?
For the experienced employees, well, I’ll tell you one of the really interesting things that we’re excited about, and we have a company from Mexico, ViaChem, that’s been helping us with this. Which is to actually roll it out in Spanish.
That’s important.
That is something that, we have an advisory group of manufacturer members that give us suggestions on how to make additions and what would be additive to it. And so that was one of the things that they were looking for. But we’ve added things like chemical safety board videos in there and process safety elements to it, really trying to build that out.
Then the other piece I know that is just a hot topic at the moment with the Trump administration coming in, is just the effect of DOGE, the effect of the administrative changes, potentially federal employees leaving, getting skinnied down, and the effect that potentially has on regulatory approvals, innovation, and more. Talk to me about that from a SOCMA perspective.
Yeah. I mean, living in Washington, it has been an absolute crazy month.
I can imagine.
I understand that there is some desire to find efficiencies in the federal government, and that makes perfect sense. We’re about a month in now. A lot of sweeping changes have been enacted, but we are really concerned about the ability of the federal workforce to perform the duties that we as Americans have become accustomed to and we take for granted because they work seamlessly.
So give me an example of what that could be.
I mentioned earlier that I have a passport that I need to renew. So I only have a few months before I need to be traveling or I can’t travel because it expires. I don’t know if the state department will have enough people to process my passport in a normal time frame. So those are things that, you’re not thinking about, but all of us in this industry and listening to this podcast would be interested to know.
I honestly hadn’t thought about the passport processing until you mentioned it. Well, I’m good for another year or two, so I’m okay. But we’ll see what happens.
Right, I’m starting to panic. I’m gonna go and take my forms back to the post office, which I hear is now getting privatized.
Or rumors have said so.
Yeah. At least the latest headlines on that. But coming back to how does that hit the industry, and it is a concern. So on the one hand, we can feel somewhat confident that the number of new regs coming is probably pretty limited. Right? Turning down that spigot on new regulatory announcements. But on the flip side, we know that new chemistries, new pharmaceuticals, all kinds of new entries to the market are already slowing or slower than they need to be.
Innovation is getting throttled already. So what happens if your case manager either takes a federal buyout or they are part of the DOGE workforce reduction? What happens to the pile? We already don’t have enough employees to keep our businesses moving.
So we’re really concerned about that, and somebody’s gonna be that person. Some company that is waiting right now is going to have their case manager not be there tomorrow, and then we’re gonna have to see what the realities are inside the agency to keep things moving.
I’ve certainly heard, really, for the past several years it’s been really slow to get products approved, to get the cast numbers, to get whatever it is that people need that they’re relying on a government service to provide.
New chemicals has been the primary focus for SOCMA. This is the pipeline of innovation, and that’s what we focus on primarily is new chemistries. And we know that it’s been a very long process. They’re supposed to give you an answer in 90 days. Right now, it takes about a year and a half. But I just talked to a new person that’s going back to the EPA, and she says prepare for two years. If you put a new chemical in today, it’s likely to take two years. So they really have a long backlog.
Yeah. And the hard part of that, of course, is everybody’s trying to innovate, grow, meet new sustainability targets. There’s all kinds of things, and so if we can’t get the products approved, it’s hard to meet the targets that we’ve set for ourselves or that others have set for us.
Yeah, but we are hopeful. I mean, if we can tie together the aims of this new administration together with the areas of improvement, what can we do to fix things rather than to talk about what’s broken? But let’s put the solutions on the table and the more bite-sized those solutions are, the more likely we are to get movement.
I love that. I appreciate how you say the aims of the administration because it’s not to decimate things. It’s to make it better More efficient. More cost effective because, as you say, twelve to eighteen months or two years to approve a new product, we know that’s wrong. So how do we fix it?
Yeah. We have a huge advantage in SOCMA because we represent contract and toll and custom manufacturers as well as specialty chemical producers themselves. So about 80% of our members do both. But in this survey that we asked about what’s the available capacity for your facilities right now, people are reporting anywhere from 10 to 20% seems to be the largest, but some are even over 30%.
You might say that’s a negative thing, that pipeline softness is happening. That may be true, but we also know that there are a number of companies that used the downturn in the end of 2022 and 2023 to actually do all the reinvestments after they were running so hot and so hard during COVID. It was a great time to actually take a pause, put in new assets. I know of one company that literally took an entire building down and put another building back up. They had been waiting for an opportunity to take their assets offline, and this gave them the chance to kind of reset. So we know people who have put a lot of CapEx in for exactly this purpose because the expectation is that with all of the pressures and all of the global dynamic shifts, that North America is going to be a place where you’re gonna want to do local production.
And having 30% capacity means that the opportunities are there.
Victoria Meyer [00:28:26]:
Yeah. Poised for growth is what it sounds like to me. So, Jennifer, this has been great. If there were things that you would tell people to keep your eye on because these are signposts for the year and signposts as we go forward, what would they be?
Yeah. So I think we need to really understand the federal workforce. Paying attention to what happens after this initial surge of activities through executive orders, all of what Elon Musk is doing has been fluctuating right now, and some of the cabinet members are not in place yet. So then how do you transition from the White House led initiatives into the agencies? So I think there’s a bumpy part that’s gonna happen there. We’re gonna need to wait and see what happens, And then we’re gonna have to do a lot of proactive, supportive messaging to the administration on how we’re going to help, and we are going to help with these aims.
Yeah. We are in a good place.
I mean, obviously, with you being based in Washington, DC, and I know just the efforts that SOCMA and its team puts in terms of helping to navigate this environment is so critical.
Yeah.
Awesome. Well, thank you for joining me today. This has been really great.
Thank you for having me.
Absolutely. And thanks everyone for watching and listening today. Keep watching. Keep listening. Keep following, and we’ll talk with you again soon.
About Jennifer Abril:
Jennifer Abril was appointed President & CEO of SOCMA in late 2016 and is responsible for the strategic and operational management of the association. Jennifer is not a stranger to SOCMA, having previously served as the association’s Director of Performance Improvement in 2006-2008 and was responsible for the development and implementation of ChemStewards®.
As President & CEO, Jennifer has been laser focused on showcasing SOCMA’s position as the primary hub for the specialties sector. As a part of this transformation, Jennifer has led her team to refresh its programming and offer new opportunities to develop business partnerships and build industry connections across the supply chain.
Prior to her current role, Jennifer served as the President of the International Fragrance Association, North America from 2008-2016. Under her leadership, Jennifer expanded the membership by 30 percent, enhanced its educational offerings, and made significant strategic advancements during her tenure. Jennifer also spent eight years at the American Chemistry Council where she advanced the association’s international regulatory harmonization efforts on product stewardship and public health issues, in addition to developing marketing and business development strategies.
Jennifer earned a B.A. in International Studies from The American University and holds a M.S. in Management from the University of Maryland, University College. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two sons.