Fragrance and flavor company IFF says it is ushering in a new era with the expansion of its LMR Naturals site in Grasse, France, which was inaugurated earlier this week during an event attended by the company’s senior management, members of the press and mayor of Grasse Jérôme Viaud. IFF has invested €10m in the site’s expansion which has increased the facility’s footprint by 75% to 4,687m2 (50,450ft2).
LMR Naturals was founded in 1983 by Monique Remy and acquired by IFF in 2000.
The company says that the investment will accelerate the development of new natural ingredients, boost its capacity, fuel innovation and enhance its sustainability profile. It adds that the enlarged site is a significant step in enabling IFF to meet the growing global demand for traceable, sustainable and high-quality naturals.
The upgraded facility in Grasse includes a new pilot hall that integrates the company’s extraction technologies, and also brings together more than 30 research and development experts under one roof. Thanks to the expansion, the company intends to launch four to six new products each year. LMR Naturals has introduced 23 new ingredients since 2020. The expansion is presented as key asset for the company’s perfumers.
“The site that we are inaugurating represents both continuity but also a rupture. Continuity because it extends Monique [Remy’s] vision to offer perfumers pure, natural ingredients of impeccable quality, and a rupture because it brings LMR into a new stage, where it will raise innovation even higher, explore new sectors and new extraction methods, and create the natural ingredients of tomorrow that will be more traceable, more responsible and more expressive. It is our way of honoring heritage by projecting it towards the future,” commented IFF Fine Fragrance President Sabrya Meflah.
Indeed, while emphasizing that the investment highlights IFF’s commitment to natural ingredients, the company also revealed its ambitions to expand the use of LMR Naturals in the areas of beauty care.
A new experimental field
In tandem with the expansion of the LMR site, IFF also acquired a new experimental field near the facility in Grasse, which is intended to aid the exploration of the potential of plant materials and thereby fast track ingredient innovation. The new field is almost twice the size of IFF’s previous field in Grasse, and importantly, the company is now owner of the land providing it with more flexibility.
“The new experimental field will allow us to go further in agricultural research, in the understanding of plants, plant metabolism, how to cultivate plants and how to mechanize production – all these areas that are key for our industry, key for our future and are also a hallmark of LMR,” Bertrand de Préville, Managing Director of LMR Naturals commented.
IFF perfumer Juliette Karagueuzoglou added: “The new field will provide us with more; it will serve as a laboratory for us and opens up new possibilities.”
Commitment to Grasse
The investment also underlines IFF’s commitment to the strategically important city of Grasse, which is known as the world’s fragrance capital.
During the inauguration ceremony, IFF credited the role of mayor of Grasse Jérôme Viaud in the extension of the site. Viaud has pushed to highlight Grasse’s role in the fragrance industry in recent years.
“This expansion confirms the central role of Grasse as a global hub of natural ingredients and a place where tradition and innovation come together. This [site] embodies and catalyzes what makes Grasse strong – an alliance between heritage and the future, between ancestral know-how and cutting-edge technologies,” Viaud commented.