Personal Care & Aroma Ingredients
About Personal Care & Aroma Ingredients
Personal Care & Aroma Ingredients offers solutions for customers in the personal care, home care, and fine fragrance markets. Our extensive portfolio includes aroma ingredients, vitamins and natural bio-actives, as well as UV filters, peptides and polymers. Our solutions support the health and beauty needs of an aging population with various skin and hair types around the world, and address increasing concerns around global public health issues such as air pollution and skin cancer.
Personal Care & Aroma Ingredients performance
Personal Care & Aroma Ingredients recorded -4% organic sales development in 2020, due to weak demand in sun protection and cosmetics which started to recover in the fourth quarter. Sales of Aroma Ingredients were good throughout the year, supported by increased demand for detergents and disinfectants.
Resilience in the face of COVID-19
Sales of fine fragrances declined due to new patterns of working from home, physical distancing, and mask-wearing during 2020. However, this effect was offset by increased uptake for household cleaning products, which drove sales of aroma ingredients in this sector. Sun care products were affected by the pandemic’s restrictive effect on outdoor recreational activities and tourism. This impacted the market in UV filters for sun protection.
On the upside, COVID-19 accelerated the trend toward conscious, sustainable consumption in personal care. We responded with the launch of sustainable and resilient innovations and services for sun, hair and skin care applications such as the innovative glow-enhancing peptide, SYN-GLOW™.
We also upgraded our free online formulation lab tool Sunscreen Optimizer™ by adding a function for easily evaluating the eco-profile of products.
Partnerships and portfolio expansion
Through our new partnership with METEX NØØVISTA, we launched a sustainable form of cosmetic grade 1,3-propanediol (PDO), a multifunctional ingredient sourced entirely from non-GMO feedstocks. This bio-sourced cosmetic grade of PDO imparts preservative boosting properties while respecting the skin microbiome.
We also signed a collaboration and commercialization agreement with S-Biomedic. With this agreement we aim to bring a new probiotic technology-based skin care active for the treatment of acne to market.
Growth of e-commerce and continued sustainability drive and improved go-to-market
Niche and Indie brands with an e-commerce offering and a social media presence gained leverage in 2020, and there was a positive impact from companies hastening to build online platforms. To address this trend, we improved digital presence, distributor and lead management, as well refreshed our positioning externally.
We completed the roll-out of our Imp’Act Card™ program — a tool to provide customers data around four pillars of sustainability: environmental impact, social impact, traceability and identity. We additionally introduced multiple programs to improve how we go to market, including improving our digital presence and our distributor and lead management, as well as rolling out our refreshed positioning externally.
