In 1903, T. Hasegawa started business in Tokyo. That year is mentioned again and again because it made the company the first in Japan to turn flavours and fragrances into an industry — before that, taste in Japan was still a matter of handicraft workshops. Over the following 120 years, Hasegawa's rhythm has largely followed Japan's food and beverage industry: in the post-war decades, as Japanese beverages, dairy and convenience foods expanded, Hasegawa became the flavour stage behind those companies; later it built factories and laboratories across Japan and set up in China, Southeast Asia, Europe and the Americas. Today Hasegawa is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (code 4917), headquartered in Nihonbashi-Honcho, Tokyo. It is the longest-standing company in Japan's flavour and fragrance industry, and it has always been at the front in flavours.

The mission Hasegawa sets itself is "creating value for customers through aroma and flavour". The words are plain, but the work is fine. Beverages and dairy are the two areas Hasegawa handles best, and what those applications demand of a flavour is not the same as what a perfume demands: whether it smells beautiful comes second; first it has to hold up in water, in milk, after sterilisation and across the shelf life. So when Hasegawa evaluates a raw material, it often looks not at how striking the aroma is, but at how much is left once it enters the system and what it becomes after three months. A technical exchange with Hasegawa often opens like this: describe the application scenario first — acidic or neutral, cold fill or hot fill, how long the shelf life — and only then talk about the material. That order felt unfamiliar at first. Later we decided it was right.

The business divides into four. Flavours cover beverages, dairy, confectionery, bakery, savoury and health foods, with beverages and dairy the strongest. Fragrance compounds serve cosmetics, personal wash and home care. Food ingredients covers natural extracts, functional ingredients and seasonings. And aroma materials is where it develops and produces synthetic and natural aroma materials of its own. What connects us to Hasegawa is the natural extracts part, and the aroma material fraction that can go into an ingredient list. Hasegawa has decades of application research behind it, so its questions go right into the system: does it dissolve, does it turn cloudy, how much aroma is lost after heating. The place we take on is this: cultivation, extraction, refining and application testing strung into one line with no handover in the middle — Hasegawa tells us clearly which system it will be used in, and we tune to that system rather than handing over something generic and letting Hasegawa try it back home.

There are quite a few differences between the two companies. Hasegawa is a hundred-year company that works by the book; a change is argued through before it is put into practice. We are a thirty-year plant, used to starting first and adjusting after, solving problems on the spot. Hasegawa is strong at the application end and knows what the finished product needs; we are strong at the raw material end and know what this plant can give. Hasegawa's rhythm is slow and values leaving a record; ours is fast and values flexibility. In the beginning these differences genuinely caused friction. But working together longer, we found the differences mesh: the application end raises the requirement and the raw material end makes it possible; Hasegawa sets the method and we raise the speed; Hasegawa thinks risks through in advance and we solve site problems in advance. If there is one thing we agree on, it is this — fast or slow, in the end it is all so that that drink, that yoghurt, tastes the same from January to December.

At the start we did not even dare send a quotation; the whole point was just to get the process working. The first year was basically mutual probing: Hasegawa gave the application scenario, we produced samples, Hasegawa took them back and tried them in its own system, and feedback came back for us to revise. There was one sticking point: a batch showed slight turbidity in Hasegawa's beverage system. Every figure was fine; it simply did not look right in the bottle. For that turbidity we re-ordered refining depth and concentration ratio, and later added another treatment step, and the problem was solved. After that we learned something: material for Hasegawa cannot be made only to raw material standards — it has to be made to the system at the end.

On technology we prefer to let results speak. Living-Fragrance physical extraction moves the plant's original aroma structure across intact by physical means, with the smallest possible deviation of the aroma profile from the fresh raw material — a Hasegawa flavourist can smell where the difference lies at once. Supercritical fluid extraction is low temperature throughout with no solvent entering the process, so residue moves from "detected" to "not detected", which is the precondition for entering a food system. Dynamic multi-stage counter-current extraction runs several stages against the flow and presses the loss of actives from over twenty percent down to a few points, and the saving goes straight into the quotation. Aroma concentration enriches the effective aromatic fractions so that dosage is small and performance controllable, which is especially useful in a system as dosage-sensitive as a beverage. Molecular distillation and controlled release take purity up another notch and keep the aroma releasing evenly across the whole shelf life — the "how much is left after three months" that Hasegawa cares about most rests on this step.

The engineers doing the scoring have changed several times; the assessment has not. The numbers on the test report look better year by year. On supply, raw material runs a small trial on arrival and only enters the main line once it passes — we do not experiment with bulk production. Before the peak season we lock capacity and raw material once more, and both sides feel settled. Service uses the clumsy method too: Hasegawa's standards are first translated into our internal control indicators and then issued to the workshop; on every shipment three samples are kept, one for ourselves, one on file, one travelling with the goods. Beyond the buying and selling, it is really two teams backing each other up.

For the years ahead, what sits on both calendars is this: joint development of several natural varieties in beverage systems, further optimisation of shelf-life performance, and completion of sustainable sourcing documentation. Hasegawa has 120 years of application research and a group of long-standing customers; we have thirty years of extraction craft and the raw-material land of Guangxi. Neither depends on the other, and neither can do without the other.

This article was published on 2026-09-14, and last updated on 2026-09-21. The article will be continuously updated.