Biofuels Digest has ranked Sweetwater Energy, Inc, a Rochester NY-based renewable sugar producer, as both a “2014 Hottest 50 Bioenergy Company” and a “2014 Hottest Smaller Companies in the Advanced Bioeconomy.”

Sweetwater, one of the youngest companies on either list, was ranked #36 on the Hottest 50 Bioenergy Companies ranking, and at #13 on the Hottest 30 Small Companies ranking from a total of more than 4,000 eligible companies. Both lists are compiled each year by the staff at Biofuels Digest to take the pulse of the industry.

“It’s an exciting industry to be in, and quite an honor to be acknowledged this way,” says Arunas Chesonis, chairman and CEO of Sweetwater. “We’ve been working hard on building our first sugar facilities and new partnerships, and we’re very enthusiastic about what we’ll be revealing in 2015.”

Sweetwater extracts sugars from many types of plant material as well as from waste carbon dioxide. Those sugars are in essence a renewable alternative to petroleum because most products built from petroleum—such as plastics, fuels, and many chemicals—can also be built from Sweetwater’s sugars.

Sweetwater’s unique business model was patented in 2012 for the manufacture and deployment of distributed pretreatment units designed for the extraction of sugars from any cellulosic feedstock. This proprietary process allows Sweetwater to provide broad scale diversity for cellulosic ethanol production that takes full advantage of economic and capacity constraints surrounding cellulosic biomass.