To investigate what the fragrance industry thought about the potential of our project, we arranged a meeting with two representatives from the company Givaudan, global leaders in flavour and fragrance compound production, who have a base local to us in Ashford. Brogan and Matt met with Sarah Birch and Steve Watkins, who are both research scientists with Givaudan.
After giving them an overview of our project, we discussed with Sarah and Steve the potential benefits and downfalls of our project if it was scaled up to an industrial level. They highlighted how in industry a major concern in is cost, and we discussed how for some rare or difficult to synthesise fragrances, this could be a very cost effective method of production. However with other fragrance compounds there is already very cheap ways to make them, so it would be difficult to get companies to change production methods for these. We also discussed the benefits and downfalls of having a natural product. Natural products are often described as having a more 'rounded' scent, and are subsequently more valuable and often preferred by consumers. However in some products, such as harsh cleaning products, natural fragrances are not suitable as they break down, and therefore synthetic options are preferred. The freeing up of land for food crop production was seen as a very positive point as companies are becoming more and more aware of their environmental impact, and how consumers prefer to buy from more environmentally friendly companies.
Overall this was an extremely valuable experience for us to gain an insight into the industrial perspective of our project. The biggest issue for allowing our project to be implemented in industry would be ensuring the cost of the production of the fragrance compounds is kept low.
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