Ease of isolation: Carbohydrates such as starch, cellulose, lactose and sucrose can be isolated by extremely simple industrial chemical processes.

Availability: Carbohydrates such as starch, cellulose, lactose and sucrose are readily available commercially in large-scale quantities.

Purity or consistency of composition: Carbohydrates can be either highly crystalline pure substances (eg, sucrose or glucose), very pure powders (e.g. lactose and maltose), or powders or syrups of extremely high chemical integrity (e.g. starch, cellulose, chitin, maltodextrins and starch hydrolysates)

Cost: Although they have much greater chemical potential, carbohydrates such as cellulose and lactose are cheaper than crude oil.

Optical integrity: Carbohydrates have unparalleled optical integrity. For instance, the percentage of L-glucose in starch, cellulose, or lactose is immeasurably small.

Contiguous chiral centers: Carbohydrates have the highest density of chiral centers of all known molecules. Since many drugs have multiple chiral centers, the use of carbohydrates requires fewer steps.

High density of functional groups: Carbohydrates have the highest density of functional groups of all known molecules.

Renewable resource: Unlike fossil fuels, carbohydrates can never be depleted.

No strategic resource downside: Unlike the case with fossil fuels, no nation has a strategic hold on carbohydrate resources. Availability and price are very stable.

Good solubility in water: Water is the most benign solvent. This is important from a "green chemistry" perspective as well as economically since working with harmless solvents requires less clean-up at the end stage of manufacture.