In the flavour and fragrance industry, not many companies pull "fragrance ingredients" out and run them as a business line of their own. IFF is one of them. It makes its own synthetic molecules — Iso E Super®, Hedione and others of that kind — and it also works in natural aromatic materials, walking on both legs at once. That looks like nothing more than an organisational choice, but think a little deeper and it says a great deal: a company willing to treat raw materials as a business in their own right is not going to be casual about how it picks them.

IFF's origins go back to 1889, when Leopold Schwarz and his brother-in-law Joseph Polak founded Polak & Schwarz in Zutphen, the Netherlands, starting out in flavours. The other strand was the fragrance business A.L. van Ameringen opened independently in the United States in 1917, renamed van Ameringen-Haebler in 1929. The two merged in 1958 and International Flavors & Fragrances Inc. was formally established — "Flavors" and "Fragrances" each taking half the name, and both still there today. After that: listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1964; co-founded the Monell Chemical Senses Center with the Monell Foundation in 1968; acquired Laboratoire Monique Rémy of Grasse in 2000, today's IFF LMR Naturals; bought Israel's Frutarom for USD 7.1 billion in 2018; and completed the merger with DuPont's Nutrition & Biosciences business in 2021 at an enterprise value of around USD 45.4 billion. In the past two years IFF has been actively trimming: in 2026 it announced the sale of its food ingredients business to CVC, pulling its strength back into three areas — taste, scent, and health and biosciences. Today IFF's annual sales are around USD 10.9 billion, with roughly 22,000 employees worldwide, operations across more than 40 countries, about 150 production sites and laboratories, and headquarters on West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York.

Over the years of dealing with IFF, the strongest impression is that the word "science" is actually carried out rather than spoken. As early as 1968 it built a chemical senses centre with the Monell Foundation to study the basic mechanisms of taste and smell — almost unique in this industry. In 2012 IFF adopted the twelve principles of green chemistry; in 2016 it launched PuraVita™, the world's first Cradle to Cradle certified fragrance; an EcoVadis gold rating and a place on the CDP climate A List are also on the record. In purchasing, these ideas turn into requirements you can weigh and measure. When IFF looks at a natural material, beyond the usual physical and chemical figures it arranges a sensory panel to run a blind assessment, breaking the aroma profile into top, middle and base and scoring each part separately. Send the same material again half a year later and the score curve has to line up. At first we found the process heavy — samples went back and forth many times — but in the long run it made us more settled: when there is a standard, nobody has to guess.

On the business side, IFF now has three segments. Taste covers beverages, dairy, savoury, confectionery and bakery, and snacks, and serves growing mid-sized customers through Tastepoint by IFF. Scent is split into three lines: fine fragrance, consumer fragrances and fragrance ingredients. Health & Biosciences supplies enzymes, probiotics, cultures, plant proteins and dietary fibres. What ties most closely to us is the natural part within the Scent segment, plus the Taste segment's need for natural flavour expression — put plainly, the natural materials that form the skeleton of a fragrance formula, and the natural ingredients that have to hold up on a food label. When IFF brought LMR Naturals of Grasse in-house in 2000, the intention was exactly to keep the natural line in its own hands. And what lets us take it on is that everything from the seedling in the field to the last test before shipment sits inside our own system — no outsourcing, no passing it on. If a parameter needs changing at some step, we change it the same day and see the result the same day.

On many things, our thinking knocks against IFF's in the same place. On "truth": IFF developed its Living Flower technology so that perfumers would get a real flower scent rather than a substitute; our Living-Fragrance physical extraction thinks exactly the same thing — keep the plant's own aroma, do not destroy its structure. With the direction aligned, many process parameters meet in the middle as soon as either side raises them. On the boundary between natural and synthetic: precisely because IFF understands synthetics so well, it is unusually careful on the natural side — purity, solvent residues and foreign additives all have to be stated clearly, and no drift between batches. On spending money: IFF puts a considerable share of revenue into R&D and fundamental research every year, and our own investment in bases, equipment and processes is budgeted by the year as well; neither side expects to earn it back next year. On compliance: IFF serves markets across the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific, each with a different rhythm, so we are used to preparing documents and data in advance rather than patching things up once a question arrives.

The cooperation, from sending the first sample to entering an annual framework, took two raw-material seasons in between. After that, one joint development project left a deep mark on us. IFF wanted a natural material that could carry the skeleton of a fragrance, and asked for aroma completeness and batch stability at the same time. The project was done together from the selection stage: we first compared several plots and harvest windows across our partner bases in Guangxi and pinned the raw material end down; the extraction stage used Living-Fragrance physical extraction to hold the temperature down and keep the plant as it is; where the actives were not concentrated enough, aroma concentration came in so that both dosage and performance stayed controllable; once volume grew we switched to dynamic multi-stage counter-current extraction, raising efficiency while losing less of what matters; the batches with the strictest natural requirements went through supercritical fluid extraction, low temperature all the way and no solvent left behind; molecular distillation and controlled release closed it out, pushing purity one step further and making the release steadier and the scent last longer. When the project finished, IFF's feedback was that the difference between one batch and the next was small enough that their evaluation system could hardly see a step. On supply, we never promise delivery dates loosely, but the dates we do promise are usually met early; standard items are kept in stock, custom items run on a dedicated line, and the two run separately. On service, specification, parameters and test methods are discussed together and settled in one round; the documentation is also done in advance, so when IFF comes to audit, the material is already at hand. After all these years both sides speak quite directly — if it works, it works; if it does not, we say it does not. It saves a lot of trouble that way.

For the years ahead, three items sit on both calendars: finding new botanical materials, grinding the existing processes a little finer, and watching regulatory change and preparing early. IFF has its judgement of global markets and a foundation in fundamental research rarely seen in this industry; we have thirty years of extraction experience, technology that keeps evolving, and capacity that is really there. Neither side is the other's downstream — only the division of work differs. Each does its own job well, and this can keep going.

This article was published on 2026-09-14, and last updated on 2026-09-22. The article will be continuously updated.