Perfumer & Flavorist - October 2013

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IFEAT Preview: More Than a Slogan—
Sustainability in F&F

“The one thing I thought throughout my career is that chemistry has a very bad reputation,” says Gennadiy Kolomeyer, director of R&D at Renessenz, who will
discuss sustainability and “greenness” from a chemist’s perspective
as part of the annual meeting of the International Federation of
Essential Oils and Aroma Trades in San Francisco, running September
29 to October 3 ( www.ifeat.org). Kolomeyer, whose career began
in 1977, adds, “When I first started working, there were a lot of
big environmental problems, disasters, [regulators] looking into
materials. Chemistry was something that people were looking at
as a source of the next bad news.”
He found it encouraging, then, to see the chemical industry
moving toward green and sustainable chemistry. As defined by the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, green chemistry is: “the
design of chemical products and processes that reduce or elimi-
nate the use or generation of hazardous substances.” According to
a 2011 Pike Research report, green chemistry could save industry
$65.5 billion by 2020.a While it took several years to trickle down
throughout organizations, Kolomeyer says today green chemistry
is “not just a slogan.”
“It has to be every chemist and person in the company, it should
come down from being an abstract concept to a personal philoso-
phy,” he says. “You have to go through certain steps so that your next
process meets all these concepts.” Too often, he says, publications
may declare processes “green” without properly evaluating them,
leading to “infinite shades of green.”
“It is important to give some quantification [to processes], give it
some numbers, to be sure you’re using the right tools when build-
ing processes,” says Kolomeyer. “It allows you to vet green/clean
chemistry … and make sure it’s really clean.”
Kolomeyer employs atom economy assessments in his own work
to assess the efficiency of a chemical process as measured by the
number of atoms involved. He also measures mass index to review
the environmental impact of processes.

“In developing new processes you look at the makeup of your
compound and use a sustainable source when possible,” says
Kolomeyer, adding, “it’s not always possible.”
“‘Sustainable’ can be measured differently,” Kolomeyer adds.
“How much sustainable or petrochemical carbon comes in and
goes out? What is the percentage of petrochemically derived and
sustainable carbon in the final product?”
He also stresses that the chemist is not alone in the green chem-
istry process. Procurement professionals and every other individuals
in the corporate structure must embody green principles.

“The market will drive it,” Kolomeyer concludes. “The con-
sumer goods companies are doing it. If they push their suppliers
hard enough, we will not have much of a choice but to focus our
efforts to make our new aroma chemicals more sustainable. It’s a
two-way street. The consumer and customer will make the push.”
Scott May, vice president of global innovation at Givaudan
Flavors and a presenter at the forthcoming IFEAT conference,
sees a similar push-pull between consumer demand and industry
logistics: “There is a higher and higher demand for naturals, but
at the same time, naturals are getting harder and harder to get,
and costlier. We definitely see a trend of the industry moving to
more natural flavors from a regulatory standpoint [as well], which
is going to drive the need for more natural ingredients.” (A recent
MarketsandMarkets study estimated that the global natural flavor
market would expand from revenue of $3.5 billion in 2011 to $5.1
billion in 2017.)b “If you look at the cost associated with those
[ingredients]—especially the natural specialties grown specifically
for the F&F industry—they have tracked at a higher increase in
cost compared to natural commodity-type products.”
These costs are driven in part by limited arable land and water
resources in growing regions, in addition to growers’ interest in
more lucrative non-F&F crops.

This dynamic creates significant strain on supply costs when customers demand these natural solutions but are reluctant to pay a premium. At the same time, the development process of a novel natural or synthetic material can last three to five years and involve prohibitively costly toxicological testing. As a result, says May, unless a material is going to be a “blockbuster,” the risk for new material development is too high to justify development for the F&F market.

“That means we have to find different ways to get at these materials than our traditional discovery and extraction process,” May explains. “It’s better to be able to use foodstuffs, things that are already very well known—starting from glucose or corn or anything that is readily available and cost-effective, and then doing some sort of bioconversion of that into the material you’re looking for.” Of course, the issue with creating a “globally relevant” material via bioconversion is the need to find non-genetically modified organism (GMO) substrates, May explains. Despite that GMO products have no known ill health effects, there is significant consumer and regulatory backlash against them. However, finding non-GMO substrates, May says, can be an easier and more cost-effective solution compared to sourcing some traditional F&F specialties.

“To me, biotechnology is an opportunity to revolutionize the flavor industry, probably more so than anything we’ve seen in the last couple hundred years,” May concludes. “You’re talking about being able to move in the direction of taking basic feedstocks and using synthetic biology to manipulate that into the material that you desire. You’re not reliant on the crop cycle, the farmers switching out to other crops, or traders hoarding products and [artificially increasing] prices. We’ll have much more control over that.”