Perfume production Eurofragance

Anyone interested in perfumery dreams of finding out how perfumes are actually created. We know little about perfume production, and for the most part, these are marketing myths, vague interviews and press releases. The industry has been closed since its inception due to fears of industrial espionage, and technological and creative processes are no less classified than the production of nuclear missiles. But the world is changing, and even the conservative perfume industry is ready to let the curious nose of journalists into the holy of holies - workshops and laboratories.

Not long ago, I was lucky enough to visit the Spanish company Eurofragance. It is a compounding enterprise. In other words, the company creates fragrances for perfumes, cosmetics, household chemicals and sells them to customers in the form of a concentrate, which is then added to a soap base, washing powder, candles or perfume. Eurofragance has been involved in compounding for about thirty years. Around that time, in the 90s, not far from Barcelona, ​​in the town of Rubi, where the Eurofragance plant is located, a chemical cluster began to form - many chemical and biochemical enterprises. The word "chemical plant" immediately brings to mind our gloomy domestic industrial zone, but Rubi looks like any other resort town in Catalonia. It is green, fresh, the sky is blue, flowers are blooming and birds are singing, and smiling people in bright southern clothes look as if they work somewhere in a sanatorium, and not at a serious and, one might say, city-forming chemical enterprise.

At the entrance to the Eurofragance office, you are greeted by the aroma of the day - a bottle with one of the current developments that you can try and discuss. The bottle is new every day, because the work does not stop for a minute. Eurofragance has offices in Mexico, on the east coast of the USA, in Istanbul, Dubai, Mumbai and Singapore, and these are only those countries where the company has established itself on the market for a long time and firmly.

Immediately to the right of the entrance are large open workspaces and rest areas with coffee and cookies for managers and perfumers. In the most visible place are stands with examples of developments from different branches of the company and the latest completed projects, so that Eurofragance specialists can be proud of these works and analyze them.

A separate room behind translucent glass is given over to perfumers. The workplace of a modern perfumer is not a bulky "organ" with hundreds of bottles, but an ordinary work desk and a computer.

How is a composition born? First, the word. Whether it is perfume, a fragrance for cream, washing powder or exotic Arabian bakhoor, everything begins with a discussion of the idea. Perfumers create some compositions on the instructions of the company as part of regular thematic collections. Collections can be dedicated to Pantone colors, countries, seasons, new materials and, of course, trends. Managers then go to clients with these collections and try to interest and inspire them. The fragrances from the collections are so good that they do not need any modifications, and they can be immediately ordered in the required quantity.

If some revision is required or the client has come to the company with their own technical task, then a whole team gets involved. The manager collects and systematizes all the client's wishes or creates a brief from scratch if the client is only capable of "mmm... make me something fresh that will sell well." Then an evaluator gets involved - a person who translates from the client's language to the perfume language and back. He is the best at navigating trends and knows the company's library of in-house developments. It is the evaluator who then works with the perfumer on client projects. The perfumer, based on the technical task/brief, comes up with and assembles a fragrance recipe in a special program and sends it to the lab, where lab technicians mix samples according to his recipe.

Without this whole team, one perfumer cannot cope. His time is precious. He is obliged to release at least 200 successful compositions per year. Successful means winning the client's tender and paid for. But, as you understand, not everyone wins, which means there should be several times more developments than winnings. If you take a calculator in your hands, it turns out that a perfumer needs to create at least three compositions per day. When he flies on a plane, smiles at you at a presentation, participates in a photo shoot or sits somewhere on a jury as a wedding general, he also works - with his head. He only needs the Internet, remote access to the program, a laptop or a smartphone to make edits and send a new file to the lab technicians. By the time he returns, the new composition will already be ready.

We see (in perfume encyclopedias) only the tip of the iceberg – the work of perfumers for haute perfumery – fine fragrance, but for the authors themselves it does not matter whether to create a fragrance for toothpaste or perfume. The former is perhaps even more difficult and honorable, since it will bring the company more money than five kilograms of concentrate for some niche limited edition. If you suddenly think that this is somehow too prosaic, then imagine any work that we consider creative. There is no less craft and everyday work in it, it is just not customary to talk about them. They always show only the ceremonial side.

Where did the perfumers in the Spanish company Eurofragance come from? The entire team is international. Many perfumers are from France, who studied at ISIPCA and the Givaudan school. There are specialists from Germany, Italy. They also train their own staff. One of the company's perfumers teaches at the University of Barcelona, ​​and takes the most talented students to finish their studies at her enterprise. The interns have a separate training wing, where they diligently sniff something.

Eurofragance also has a unique self-taught perfumer. In 1991, a young accountant Belen Garcia came to the plant, and at first it was "smell this", smell that, how do you like it?", and then she gradually began to select fragrances by ear (or would it be more correct to say by smell?), which she has perfect, to come up with something herself and became a perfumer. I can't even imagine how difficult it was for her, but now Belen's works cannot be called amateur. They are passionate, fiery, bright and cheerful, like their author.

In general, I want to tell about each perfumer I have met separately. The works of Luka Suzak are amazing, piercing and often strange, but they are memorable. I still can’t get his experiment with natural materials out of my head, which I dubbed “carrot-toffee pie”. An absolutely magical unsweetened gourmand, but the composition is expensive. Only some niche brand can afford it.

Celine Guivarche makes very subtle, delicate, graceful perfumes even from amber and saffron.

Angeline Poubaud is a master of illusions and transformations. She can gather the scent of a strawberry field under a rain of aldehydes and tuberose.

Olaf Larsen feels the needs of conservative men and can make for them the hundred thousandth masculine glass, and Olaf, like no one else, knows how to assemble compositions with replacement (for example, prohibited by IFRA) components so that the result is indistinguishable from the original version. A very sought-after talent in recent years.

Hunkal Toma is a fairy who can release from a bottle a living and juicy mango the size of an elephant or a pear reaching to the sky.

The multinational and talented Eurofragance team has many more perfumers, but they are busy people, so we were not able to meet all of them. In addition, we had laboratories and a factory waiting for us.

What happens when a scented composition satisfies a client? Various rigorous tests begin. If the fragrance is made for bakhoor or candles, then it is added to the appropriate carrier and burned to make sure that the smell quickly and evenly fills the room, lasts a long time and does not distort when heated. If the fragrance is for shampoo, then it is added to the soap base and washed with natural hair of different types. It looks creepy, but that's the job.

The fragrance for washing powder is tested on fabrics, and the fragrance for toilet ducks is flushed down a real toilet. Everything is done in conditions as close to combat as possible.

After checking the tactical and technical characteristics, the fragrance is tested for durability - heated in special thermal cabinets and irradiated with ultraviolet light, they check whether the perfume can survive if you and I keep it in the light or carry it in a bag. 

The fragrance is approved by the client, passed organoleptic and crash tests. The next stage is the production of a concentrate, which is then diluted with alcohol, added to a soap base or wax. The Eurofragance plant for the production of concentrate is located a few kilometers from the office, in the same green and quiet town of Rubi. The territory does not seem large and generally industrial. From the outside, there is no noise or smell. If you do not know what is inside, you will never guess from the outside that this is a chemical plant. The smell (some sweetish citrus oils) is only inside. All excursionists are dressed in robes and given special boots with reinforced toes in case a barrel falls on their feet. Employees working with raw materials additionally wear protective glasses.

In general, as it seemed to me, insurance and safety in everything is a point of the one who organized the production of Eurofragance. If we take the software of technological and business processes, then at the input and output it is necessarily the SAP accounting system accepted by all in the world community, but inside it is duplicated by software of our own development in case something happens to SAP. And without software in this work there is no way. In the palette of Eurofragance there are more than two thousand fragrant materials, and only an electronic brain can remember where what is located and how much and what needs to be poured or poured into a pan with the future concentrate.

Some of the fragrant materials are added manually. An employee equips a cart with electronic scales and rolls it along the aisle between the shelves with raw materials. He can only roll it in one direction, because special wheels will not let him rush along the rows. The program has a list of shelves and racks, the necessary barrels are found by a barcode scanner, and the required amount of raw materials is also measured by the computer. A person works only with horse-drawn drive in this system, and soon robots will completely absorb us.

All raw materials are stored at different temperatures: delicate ones in the refrigerator, viscous ones in the sauna, ordinary ones in the workshop, and everything that doesn’t spoil in the heat or cold outside. True, there are no severe colds in Barcelona. Some raw materials are worth their weight in gold and arrive at the factory from the supplier in a small can, while something like Hedione is poured straight from a 24-ton barrel sticking out in the yard.

Small doses of raw materials are mixed by people, large ones by robots. People are also only there to help - give, bring, take away a saucepan, take away a saucepan. The Colibri robot mixes volumes (this is important for some types of raw materials), the Roxane robot measures out raw materials by weight. Tubes and hoses stretching to the robots penetrate all the walls and ceiling, and at some point you realize that you are inside Leviathan, which is making perfume right now above your head.

The result of the joint work of people and robots is also checked by a laboratory. At the Eurofragance plant, it is its own and it has different goals than the laboratory in the office. The raw materials are checked most carefully on chromatographs and by nose. They must be stable, otherwise different batches of the same fragrance will differ, and this is unacceptable. If the supplier of the raw materials lets you down, there is always another supplier in stock. This situation reminded me of the joke about the prudent passenger who bought two tickets so as not to lose them. But just in case, he also has a travel pass. Exactly the same strict control for finished products. And if these are repeat batches, they are also compared with a reference sample, which is stored in a special warehouse for two years. It is believed that after this period of time, the reference is no longer the reference.

Ready-made fragrances from the Eurofragance warehouse are flying all over the world. The most capacious market now is the Persian Gulf countries, where they make “real Arabian perfumes” from Eurofragance compositions.

Thanks to Eurofragance for the opportunity to learn more about the creation of perfumes, for interesting and informative communication. With such persistence and curiosity, with such openness to the world and everything new, I think the company will do well.

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