Modern Perfumery Industry

1 ECONOMIC FACTORS AFFECTING PERFUME INGREDIENT PRODUCTION 

The four main factors which affect the volume of use of a fragrance ingredient are its odour contribution to a fragrance, its stability and performance in the products to be perfumed, its safety in use and its cost. The first three factors are discussed in the chapters on perfumery, applications, safety and ingredient design (Chapters 7, 9, 10 and 14, respectively). The fourth factor, cost, depends on raw material availability and chemical process technology. These topics will be discussed in this chapter. 

The fragrance industry lies between the petrochemical and pharmaceutical industries in terms of scale of production and cost per kg of product. The production scale is closer to that of the pharmaceutical industry, but the prices are closer to those of the bulk chemicals industry. 

This means that the fragrance chemist has to work hard and think creatively and opportunistically in order to provide materials at an acceptable cost and without the advantages of scale that the bulk chemicals industry enjoys. One method by which the desired result is achieved is by seeking out materials which the bulk industries use as intermediates or produce as by-products and using them as feedstocks for the preparation of perfume ingredients. The application of this approach will be obvious in many of the following sections of this chapter. These sections are mostly based on family trees of materials produced from a common feedstock or group of feedstocks. 

The experienced fragrance chemist will build economic considerations into his thinking, even at the stage of designing new molecules, since he knows that a material will not be successful if it cannot be produced at a competitive cost. 

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Nowadays, some natural oils are much less expensive because of automated farming methods. For instance, rows of lavender in a field can be cut almost to ground level and fed directly into a still pot carried on the tractor (Figure 3.13). The pot is then fitted under a field still and the oil extracted while the harvesting continues. The cost of lavender oil is thus tens, rather than thousands, of pounds per kg. Despite this, the modern perfumery industry would be unable to function as it does if it were to rely solely on natural ingredients. Cost alone would be prohibitive,... 

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