FF

Futurefuel Corp.

A maker of specialty chemicals and biofuels, FutureFuel Corp. runs a sprawling manufacturing plant in Batesville, Arkansas, producing custom chemicals for coatings, polymers, detergents, agriculture, and pharmaceuticals, plus biodiesel made from vegetable oils and used cooking oil. The company began in 2005 as a St. Louis-area acquisition vehicle called Viceroy Acquisition Corp., which bought the Batesville plant from Eastman Chemical and renamed itself FutureFuel. A fun twist: that plant's roots go back to the 1970s, when Eastman Kodak built it to make photographic chemicals—so the site once helped develop film.