The Smell of Competition

(2 of 2)

Like top athletes or singers, IFF's best perfumers draw salaries that approach $1 million, including bonuses based on successful fragrance sales. Even for someone with a naturally strong sense of smell, it takes more than a decade of training and apprenticeship to develop a refined understanding of the thousands of compounds smell authors draw upon. "Not everyone who blends a few ingredients is a true perfumer," says Subrenat. "Just as not everyone who burns a steak at home is a three-star Michelin chef." The best scent specialists are so savvy that they can identify the most prominent three "notes" in any commercial product with a smell, and can often guess who designed it.

Related

Photos

How Perfume Gets Made

Racing to Get Ahead

The perfect scent isn't worth anything, though, until it leaves the laboratory. To capture and translate the smell of a plant for consumers, IFF relies on a kind of camera for smell. The bell-shaped glass tool captures a living plant's "headspace": the air surrounding it. Using chromatography and mass spectrometry, scientists analyze the captured molecules, and computer programs help map out the plants' primary components. Most have between 60 and 120, with as many as 100 minor notes. Developers re-create the smell using natural or synthetic oils. To do that, IFF draws on a rotating mix of more than 2,000 plants, flowers and herbs at its R&D facility in New Jersey, which is home to the world's largest collection of aromatic orchids, with 750 distinct varieties.

IFF's most successful products, of course, use these thousands of scents in perfumes. In 1996, Estée Lauder's Clinique brand wanted to put joy in a bottle. What does happiness smell like? IFF's smell scientists have been studying the psychological and physiological responses evoked by fragrances since 1983, so they answered that question with research rather than poetry. They blended dozens of scent notes from flowers, herbs, plants and fruits and tried them on hundreds of test subjects. The citrus-heavy perfumes were consistently associated with joy, well-being and, well, happiness. Clinique Happy, which has earned a queen's ransom for Estée Lauder, went on to become one of the top five perfume launches of the decade.

Fragrance makers are using this long history of intensive research and development to expand their markets by introducing scent into unexpected places. IFF, for example, has embedded lavender and chamomile in pillows for Marks & Spencer and has woven the smell of "clean" into socks for Target. The textiles in these products use microcapsules filled with scent that lingers even after dozens of washings. Another recent innovation from IFF resulted in smell-blocking garbage bags.

One of the biggest opportunities for flavor makers is the recent push by food manufacturers to market healthier packaged foods. A team of five researchers at IFF spent more than three years coming up with a low-sodium flavoring that could reproduce the salty taste of canned soups, for instance. Givaudan is also developing low-sodium, low-sugar and low-fat flavors intended to replicate the taste and texture of their full-figured counterparts. "We know how ice cream needs to taste to please an Italian, American or a Swede," says Givaudan spokesman Peter Wullschleger. "Taste and smell are cultural."

That cultural sensitivity is a crucial competitive advantage. The fastest-growing markets are in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia, and the fragrance giants hope their staff's noses and palates are global enough to understand their new customers. At Givaudan the CEO is French, the CFO Swiss, the head of fragrance Indian, and the flavor director Mexican. IFF has an American CEO and a Frenchman and Argentine in charge of fragrances and flavors, respectively.

However tough the competition, the industry is united in one concern. Development, says Subrenat of the World Perfumery Congress, is endangering its raw materials. India has lost thousands of acres of its sweet-smelling sandalwood trees, for instance, over the past decades. If that trend continues, it will be even harder for fragrance-and-flavor companies to develop the next blockbuster smell or taste. Already, for every five to 10 samples perfumers dream up and perfect, just one generates a sale.

For now, the sultans of smell continue their quest for the countless smells and flavors yet to be unearthed. Trekking to ever more remote spots, they nose around, smell cameras in hand, hunting for the next sensory masterpiece.