For someone unfamiliar with Symrise, could you explain how the company's portfolio is evolving, what it encompasses, and how it is divided?
Symrise is a leader in flavors and fragrances. We started in the food and perfume industries, with vanilla as a key flavor and fragrance ingredient in foods, beverages, perfumes, as well as cosmetics and toiletries. Over time, the business split into separate segments—flavors for food and fragrances for perfumery applications. Our current focus includes Taste, Nutrition & Health, which involves flavors and health insights, and Scent and Care, which involves fragrances, aroma molecules and cosmetic ingredients.
We have expanded beyond flavors and fragrances into natural ingredients and health solutions. We also have a strong background in chemistry, where we operate six chemical plants that help us remain backwards-integrated in specialty fragrance ingredients. Through acquisitions and our own development, we have managed a transformational process into Taste, Nutrition & Health and formed a so-called augmented flavor house.
When you consider the wide geographic reach of your operations, where would you say the most amount of demand is coming from in 2025?
Our core business in the Taste, Nutrition & Health segment is food and beverage applications as well as pet food, particularly with innovations for healthy nutrition, we see good growth opportunities in the future. Pet food is also expanding rapidly, especially since COVID-19, with pet populations growing at twice the rate of humans; the pet population is increasing by 2% while the human population is growing by 1%. In the Scent and Care segment, cosmetics and fragrances are seeing strong demand, especially in regions like the Middle East. All our markets and core application areas—food and beverage, pet food, cosmetics, and fragrance—are the main drivers of growth.
Geographically, in general, demand is growing most rapidly in APAC, like in China, India, and Southeast Asia. While the situation in China is mixed, the market remains robust. As I mentioned before, the Middle East is another key growth area, especially for food and fragrances. Europe is seeing steady growth, while the U.S. is experiencing a slight recession. In the U.S., for example, we invested a few years ago in egg and chicken protein, which has been very successful. The U.S. remains one of the most important markets for us, despite the current economic challenges. Latin America has been growing for many years at a good pace.
Considering you source ingredients from remote locations around the world, how do you balance your sustainability commitments with the carbon footprint of your supply chain?
Sustainability is part of our DNA; we’ve been focused on it for years, starting with sourcing natural raw materials and ensuring ethical practices. We’ve been measuring our carbon and water footprint for years as well and have set clear goals to become carbon neutral in scopes 1 and 2 by 2030 and scope 3 by 2045. We develop our own tools to analyse the environmental impact of our products, from raw materials to final products.
We also analyse every product’s footprint when reformulating, ensuring that sustainability remains a core part of our innovation. Green chemistry plays a key role in our sustainability efforts. When processing raw materials, we use green chemistry principles to reduce environmental impact. This aligns with our commitment to sustainable sourcing, ensuring that our products are both high-quality and environmentally friendly.
Given the lack of an international standard, can you explain the auditing process and how you ensure ethical standards are met throughout your supply chain?
We work with farmers in regions like Madagascar and India and ensure that human rights are respected through regular audits. Our code of ethics is crucial, and we ensure that everyone in the company is fully aware and compliant. We define standards for our partners, manage risk assessments and conduct audits where we feel it is necessary. We work closely and trustfully with our partners; we ensure their practices are aligned with our ethical standards, especially when it comes to human rights aspects, such as working conditions and child labor.
We also help develop ecosystems where farmers can grow and improve their practices, such as in Madagascar, where we work with over 7,000 farmers. We focus on sourcing materials and, equally important, on supporting the people involved in the supply chain to improve their lives and practices. We are diligent in monitoring human rights and conducting unannounced audits, ensuring that everyone in the supply chain upholds our ethical standards.
2025 is filled with relative uncertainty. What is shaping up to be the greatest challenge to your operations in 2025?
Our biggest challenge is balancing customer needs with innovation. Despite economic pressures and rising tariffs, we’re committed to investing in innovation, particularly in health, well-being, and beauty. Sourcing natural raw materials is also a challenge, especially with climate change impacting agriculture. We’re collaborating with strategic partners to secure key raw materials and anticipate future supply chain disruptions, ensuring the continued delivery of sustainable, high-quality products.
Innovation is critical because, without it, there’s a risk of being copied and commoditized. We focus on creating added value and cross-fertilizing research across different areas through an eco-system. For instance, we combine fragrance, active ingredients, and probiotics to create unique products. We also collaborate with customers to co-create solutions for key challenges like sugar, fat and salt reduction.
Symrise has developed tools called Symvision AI™ to predict global taste and ingredient trends. How is Symrise leveraging advances in technological innovation in its operations?
We’ve been using AI for some time now. For example, we developed a perfume in collaboration with IBM’s Watson, and we’ve created tools like Scenturion and Symvision AITM to help us predict trends and how they move across regions and categories to develop new products. These tools help our customers create products with specific tailored characteristics, whether it’s a soup in Vietnam or a fragrance in the Middle East. We also use AI for formula simplification, optimizing CO2 footprint, and ensuring that we can deliver innovative products efficiently.
Symrise is positioned at the intersection of three key technologies: reaction chemistry, biotechnology, and natural extraction. This combination allows us to offer a range of solutions, from fully synthetic to fully natural or somewhere in between, depending on what the customer needs. By bridging these technologies, we can create products tailored to specific requirements for natural ingredients like strawberry, onion, or chicken, with flexibility around cost, taste, intensity, and sustainability. Green chemistry is at the core of these innovations, enabling us to produce sustainable solutions that meet both consumer needs and environmental standards.
