Business for Good
Responding to Societal Concerns and Conscious Consumer Expectations
The COVID-19 pandemic has made improving quality of life through sanitation, hygiene, and nutrition more important than ever. The role of positive emotions driven by fragrances is becoming critical in the new normal.
Conscious Consumers Expectations
Today’s consumers are increasingly embracing a healthy and sustainability lifestyle, with the shift to conscious consumption growing. Against this backdrop, Firmenich strives to understand the consumer through research tools and capabilities for generating insights.
Global conscious consumer engagement
Conscious Consumer engagement is a global movement. Our Conscious Consumer research with 5,000 consumers across four regions, demonstrates that consumers support conscious consumption via four main motivational factors: strong environmental convictions, pragmatic health concerns, personal image and reputation, and brands.
Taking a Human-centric approach to food and drink
Traditional Consumer and Market Research in the food and beverage industry has used a consumption-centric model of hedonics and buying behavior. While vital, we believe that a modern approach to insights should begin, with the recognition that food and drink are fundamental to human culture. We explore the human emotions, needs, and tensions that shape our preferences and behavior and uncover insights to find solutions that meet real human needs
Our consumer and market insights work help us create responsible fragrances and flavors. To learn more about our eco-design expertise and solutions, please visit our Ingredients page, Fragrance page and Taste & Beyond page.
Tackling Global Challenges in Sanitation and Hygiene
Developing hygiene and health solutions
When COVID-19 erupted, we looked for ways to ensure the safety of our colleagues and the communities we operate in. We transformed some of our manufacturing lines to produce hand sanitizer and protect our colleagues and frontline healthcare staff in local communities.
Building on our expertise in fragrance creation and cutting-edge innovation rooted in deep consumer insights, we have been working on developing health and hygiene solutions for many years.
Tackling poor sanitation through innovative technology
Building on a collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, our Research & Development teams have developed innovative receptor-based malodor counteractant technology that can help address the threat of disease through poor sanitation and build the sanitation economy.
Learn more here.
Together with our customers and partners, we have incorporated this technology into efficient, affordable cleaning and air-freshening products for low-income consumers. These products are now available for the first time in Bangladesh and more recently in South Africa. Read more about our approach to tackling sanitation through innovation and partnerships here.
With a view to develop affordable fragrances and flavors for low-income populations and building on the Shared Senses methodology, we are working with Archipel & Co to understand low-income consumers’ needs and preferences through Community Voices, a unique and inclusive market research initiative.
Offering Nutrition Solutions
Our work on nutrition actively targets the problem of salt and sugar content in foods. High salt levels continue to be a global health concern and a major challenge for the food industry. Sugar reduction has been identified as a priority in the World Health Organization’s guidelines for improved nutrition to reduce obesity. Our natural sugar reduction strategy, enables customers to drastically reduce sugar worldwide while accommodating consumer preferences. Our Nutrition Innovation program is expanding our solutions by focusing on immunity-boosting natural botanical extracts and pre-biotic fibers for improved microbiome health.
We are also responding to demand for salt reduction in products by developing new high-performance natural flavor ingredients to improve salt perception in low sodium applications.
Thanks to solutions such as TasteGEM® and SaltPrint® we have helped many customers to reduce salt and sugar, removing over one trillion calories in total from customer food products.
In response to the flexitarian challenge, we are constantly working with global experts, chefs and our customers to advance innovative green protein solutions that are nutritious, tasty and sustainable. We are promoting alternative proteins and putting them center of plate, catalyzing a shift toward more sustainable protein production and consumption to enhance wellbeing for all.
Creators of positive emotions through consumer wellbeing
Drawing from Firmenich’s scientific expertise in the domain of emotions and cognitive sciences, our experts explore new knowledge and tools for use by our perfumers and flavorists to develop fragrances and flavors that stimulate measurable positive emotional effects.
