Page 151 - CW E-Magazine (10-6-2025)

News from Abroad

INTEGRATION BENEFITS

Unilever’s in-house fragrance capabilities to be set

up at its UK site

Unilever, the global FMCG giant, is ception,” said Mr. Richard Slater, Chief
investing GBP 80-mn (about €95-mn) R&D Officer at Unilever.
in a new state-of-the-art fragrance
facility in the UK. According to Vivek Sirohi, Global
Vice President, Fragrance at Unilever,
The in-house fragrance capabilities the move will help accelerate growth by
will be located at Port Sunlight, Eng- giving the company greater control of
land, the town founded by William the design and refinement of fragrances.
Hesketh Lever, father of the company “One of the main benefits of new ap-
that would eventually become Unilever. proach is that we can design fragrances
to work with our product chassis – the
Unilever already has R&D facili- create scents for its products and such foundation of the formulation – right
ties and factories in Port Sunlight, and partnerships remain important, it will from the start. This allows us to move
the company said the addition of a fra- look to grow its capabilities in-house swiftly from formulation to design,
grance hub will help it “bring fragrance and transition to a hybrid model, where manufacture and then launch,” he said.
innovation to its brands, with greater its digitally enabled teams are involved
speed and efficiency”. in every step of innovation and formu- “We are establishing an end-to-end
lating fragrances. fragrance supply chain which includes
The new unit will include a fra- everything from ingredient-buying to
grance research and innovation lab, a “We will combine our own scientific in-house creation. In doing so, we’ll
compounding facility where new fra- expertise in areas such as neuroscience, be best positioned to leverage our scale
grances are blended and developed, AI and digital product development to unlock value by creating unmissa-
and evaluation suites where products with existing strategic partnerships, to bly superior fragrances at best-in-class
are tested to assess performance and help deliver consistent and affordable cost,” he added.
preference. Unilever said the site will product superiority across our brands
be digitally enabled end-to-end, includ- more quickly,” the company had stated. “Building our in-house fragrance
ing robotics to blend fragrance oils and expertise and capabilities means we’ll
real time data capture, enabling digital “We are one of the world’s largest be better positioned to collaborate with,
modelling, analytics and the use of AI buyers and users of fragrance, which and leverage the expertise of, our fra-
to drive fragrance development. are absolutely critical to the product grance house partners. Our long-term
performance of so many of our brands partnerships with the fragrance houses
The building should be complete in and categories and the consumer per- remain critical,” he emphasised.
2027, although many of its functions
will start earlier than that. Wood bags contract for TA’ZIZ methanol facility
UK’s engineering firm, Wood, has with a capacity to produce 1.8 -mtpa.
Unilever had first announced its secured a contract from TA’ZIZ to pro- It will be powered using the latest clean
intention to scale up its in-house fra- vide project management consultancy energy technology.
grance design and creation capabilities (PMC) for the development of the
across its global portfolio in November UAE’s first methanol production faci- Around 40 Wood project manage-
last year, in the wake of the appointment lity in Al Ruwais Industrial City, Abu ment consultants, supported by experts
of Mathieu Lenoir as Director for Fra- Dhabi. at the company’s regional energy tran-
grance at the group’s Global Creative sition hub, will work with Ta’ziz’s
Centre. Then, Unilever had mentioned Construction will be completed by engineering, procurement and con-
that even though it has partnered with 2028, and the plant will be one of the struction (EPC) contractor to success-
fragrance houses around the world to largest methanol plants in the world, fully deliver the project.

Chemical Weekly June 10, 2025 151

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