Unilever UK is to splash out £80m on boosting its in-house fragrance innovation, including the building of a dedicated facility in Port Sunlight, Merseyside.
Plans for the “state of the art” site marked “a significant step in Unilever’s global investment to build world-class in-house fragrance capabilities, accelerating growth and productivity through fragrance design and ingredient buying, whilst continuing to work closely with key global fragrance house partners”, the supplier said.
Subject to planning permission, the fragrance facility would join Unilever’s R&D facilities and factories already established in Port Sunlight. It will feature a research and innovation lab, a compounding facility where new fragrances are blended and developed, and evaluation suites where products are tested to assess performance.
The new site would enable Unilever to bring fragrance innovation its homecare and personal care brands – including Persil, Dove, Sure and Tresemmé – a “with greater speed and efficiency” the supplier said.
It will be digitally enabled end-to-end, including robotics to blend fragrance oils and real time data-capture. This would enable “digital modelling, analytics and the use of AI to drive fragrance development”, Unilever added.
“We are delighted to announce this significant investment to build a world-class fragrance house within Unilever,” said Richard Slater, the supplier’s chief R&D officer. The planned Port Sunlight facility “further expands our leading-edge R&D capabilities in the UK and drives our ambitious plans to build expertise, partnerships and innovation at scale”.
The new site will also drive recruitment by the fmcg giant. It aims to hire industry-leading perfumers with cross-category expertise from fragrance houses around the world. The team will also include fragrance evaluators, who are trained to smell and assess fragrances, and ingredient technologists who will work on delivering fragrance innovations.
“Our new fragrance facility and expert perfumers will enable us to bring fragrance insight and innovation to our brands at speed and, working with our partners, to reinvent how fragrances are created for consumer products, leveraging cutting-edge science along with AI and robotics,” Slater added.
The £80m spend is the latest in a wider £300m investment by Unilever in the UK across offices, R&D sites and factories in the next two years. Port Sunlight is the company’s largest innovation site in the UK. Alongside two factories and two R&D labs, Unilever has also opened its Advanced Manufacturing Centre and Materials Innovation Factory, which were built in collaboration with the University of Liverpool.
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