Naturals Together Sustainable Practices

Our suppliers work with local communities to improve resident’s access to health care and education, including the construction and sustainability management of a school built in 2012.

Upcycling

Cedarwood Virginia is one of the main woods used for closet manufacturing, as the wood serves as a natural pest repellent. Firmenich uses the left-over sawdust and wood chips, too small to use for carpentry, for distillation to obtain the essential oil.

Path 2 Farm

Cultivated by small, independent farmers. This program allows for digital first-mile traceability of the resin through a proprietary profiling tool for measured impact.

Extraction Innovation

Supercritical CO2 Extraction is a technology in which carbon dioxide is put beyond its critical point, becoming a supercritical fluid with special properties. The extraction carried out at a low temperature preserves the natural profile identity of the raw material.

Naturals Together Sustainable Practices

In El Paraíso region, farmers, grouped in a cooperative,
mainly harvested pine and coffee until a disease stroke
pine and decreased their income. As Styrax is already
planted to provide shade for coffee, our partners initiated a program on Styrax to guarantee
market security and fair price, while ensuring quality and
sustainable practices through training.

Naturals Together Sustainable Practices

Our partners work directly with cooperatives and distillers of patchouli. The program offers them an alternative inclusive business model with agricultural
training, a floor and fair price mechanism with guarantee
of purchase to ensure continuous interest for them to
grow Patchouli. The project also focused on social actions like the funding of a kindergarten in Kotayasa, Central Java.

Naturals Together Sustainable Practices

The harvest of wild cistus follows a sustainable cycle.
Wheat fields are left fallow for two to three years between crops, during which they are naturally repopulated by wild cistus. Pickers collect the plants by hand during the summer and early autumn, after which the cycle begins again. The leaves are then bundled for delivery and extraction. Our local supplier has been producing a range cistus derivates for over 30 years at their state-of-the-art factory in the village of Puebla de Guzman.

Upcycling

The fruit's peel is used to create this fragrance ingredient. A special distillation process is used to decrease the amount of Limonene.
The different fractions obtained are re-assembled by specialists to offer a unique profile.

White Biotechnology

To offer alternatives to natural wood resources, Firmenich scientists developed a range of more sustainable offerings, such as Clearwood.

Clearwood is an ingredient created from white biotechnology to produce a soft and clean version of a patchouli profile.

Upcycling

The barks of cinnamon trees are peeled and air-dried for 24 hours before taking the form of hollow sticks. The most beautiful sticks are sold to the spice market while the less uniform sticks, or the chips, that are not
considered “valuable” enough for the spice market, are valorized and distilled to create cinnamon essential oil.

Moreover, while the branches are cut to extract the valuable bark on them, the leaves can also be extracted as a by-
product to create cinnamon leaf essential oil, rich in Eugenol.

Upcycling:

In Siberia, mobile distillation units are setup close to the area where trees are harvested to avoid long distance transport of 'tree-material' through Siberia.

Thanks to a high demand for timber products, many leftover twigs and needles remain after collection, and we are able to valorize this through distillation to produce this unique essential oil.