We are Innovators at Heart
Combining science and creativity in everything we do. Some of our most innovative thinking happens when we work to design products that offer a positive contribution to people, society and the world around us.
Circular design
As we seek to embed sustainably focused innovation into everything we do, circular design has become a guiding principle throughout our business. Through circular design, we are creating closed-loop systems in which materials are constantly reused and waste becomes a resource.
Where we believe our products can make one of the biggest differences from a sustainability perspective is through their positive life cycle impacts during the use phase. The scale of benefits we can enable for our customers (IFF’s “handprint”) far outweighs IFF’s manufacturing and operational “footprint”.
LCA is a quantitative assessment of environmental impacts across the life cycle of a product or service. The scope typically involves all stages of the life cycle, from raw material acquisition until the product leaves the production factory (cradle-to-gate) and ideally also includes distribution, use, and end-of-life scenarios (cradle-to-grave/cradle). LCAs prove insightful for both guidance of pre-commercial products and for reporting on and marketing of commercial products.
We were honored to work with actress Michelle Pfeiffer to develop Henry Rose, the first fine fragrance to disclose 100% of its ingredients, setting a new precedent for transparency. In addition, Henry Rose is both EWG VerifiedTM, meeting some of the strictest environmental standards, and Cradle to Cradle CertifiedTM , marking its innovation in circular design.
Green chemistry
Green chemistry principles are crucial to our evolution as a circular design company. These widely used principles – centered around energy efficiency, the use of renewable raw ingredients and the avoidance of hazardous materials – are well integrated in our R&D practices, beginning at the earliest stages of design.
From the R&D phase to commercial production, IFF scientists use our proprietary Green Chemistry Assessment Tool to quantitatively score the overall sustainability of our ingredient catalog, products and processes. We developed and implemented this tool to meet the development needs of IFF's flavor, fragrance, and encapsulated products, using our own standardized scoring system for a set of key green chemistry principles.
In addition to improving the culture of “green thinking” at IFF, the assessment tool is helping to facilitate significant reductions of waste, more efficient use of resources, greater energy efficiency and improved worker safety, among other benefits. In short, this approach is allowing for a systematic and structured approach toward more sustainable products and processes at IFF.
One key focus of our green chemistry efforts is finding novel waste-reduction methods and biotechnological innovations to create natural products from abundant raw ingredients, rather than depleting important resources such as food. This includes converting the byproducts of our natural product processes into useful fragrance ingredients. For example, our terpene-based chemistry utilizes an abundant, readily-available natural raw material – a pine-based side product from the paper industry – to create a number of high-performing fragrance ingredients.
