RebirthA.
长寿
brand

“Working with natural products is deeply embedded in the Symrise DNA. From the company’s beginnings in 1874, when its founders extracted vanillin from conifers, to today, when we process thousands of raw materials from nature,” says Ricardo Omori. The company now wants to pursue this approach even more actively and also display it externally, explains Omori, who is Senior Vice President Global Fine Fragrances and responsible for the business development of the division.

To do this, the company looked to the 220 year old Maison Lautier brand, a symbol of luxury natural materials. As a first step, Omori’s team first commissioned a historian to explore the history of the storied brand. She discovered the exciting story that begins in 1795 with a perfume merchant and producer in southern France in the city of Grasse, the birthplace of perfume. “We already knew a little bit, but I still found it very interesting to learn about the parallels between then and now,” says Ricardo Omori. His colleague Veronique Ferval adds, “What’s fascinating to me is that we basically still follow the approach of our predecessors: We rely on natural raw materials, which we extract through a great deal of manual labor and develop with highly innovative technologies.” As Vice President Creation Fine Fragrances Global, Ferval spends all of her time with fragrances and accordingly has a special relationship with these creative solutions. “It’s like a magical process.”

In the coming years Symrise will further strengthen the Maison Lautier brand by increasing the number of natural raw materials in the palette with a focus on three main pillars: Madagascar, Artisan, High Tech. “For example, in Madagascar we are constantly testing new plants to see if they are suitable for the production of essences,” says Omori. Symrise has long been familiar with the rich diversity on the East African island. Symrise’s vanilla project, which the company launched in Madagascar 15 years ago, brought the country even more sharply into focus. “We created backward integration there, meaning we took over upstream manufacturing steps. This allows us to obtain reliably available and sustainably produced raw materials while supporting thousands of small farmers,” explains Omori.

This model now serves as an example that the company follows all over the world – for example, in Ecuador, Brazil and Indonesia. This is also where the second pillar of the new brand comes in. Ferval explains, “We work in part exclusively with suppliers who know the farmers well and refine their raw materials, using handcrafted methods that are both gentle and efficient. This guarantees us high-quality substances for our portfolio.” In the past four years alone, around 42 ingredients have come onto the market in this way, which will become part of the Maison Lautier label in the future. The company will be able to launch between three and ten new substances annually, Omori estimates, with a market volume of € 400 to 500 million each in the same period.

The third pillar is the technologies Symrise uses to process the natural substances and, above all, to use them as efficiently as possible. Omori calls the Symtrap^™process a good example of this. “This has allowed us to develop new, natural essences from leftovers from vegetable production in France, which can now also replace synthetic flavors,” says Omori, emphasizing the special nature of the process. And Omori has even bigger goals for the brand. “Under the Maison Lautier umbrella, we will build an exciting portfolio that would still inspire its founders in Grasse with its creativity and innovation.”