Presently, very few compounds of commercial interest are directly accessible from carbohydrates by using nonfermentive approaches. We describe here a catalytic process for the direct formation of methyl lactate from common sugars. Lewis acidic zeotypes, such as Sn-Beta, catalyze the conversion of mono- and disaccharides that are dissolved in methanol to methyl lactate at 160 degrees C. With sucrose as the substrate, methyl lactate yield reaches 68%, and the heterogeneous catalyst can be easily recovered by filtration and reused multiple times after calcination without any substantial change in the product selectivity.

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Zeozymes: Sn‐Beta zeolite is found to be a highly active catalyst for the conversion of triose sugars. If the solvent is water, isomerization of the triose sugars takes place to form lactic acid in 90 % yield at 125 °C. If methanol is used as the solvent, an overall isomerization–esterification reaction takes place and methyl lactate is formed in quantitative yields at 80 °C. This represents one of the most selective zeolite‐catalyzed biomass transformation reactions.

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