UK: Unilever invests £80 million in new fragrance facility

Unilever, the consumer goods manufacturer, has announced an £80 million ($102 million) investment to build in-house fragrance capabilities in the UK. The plan includes constructing a new state-of-the-art fragrance facility at its Port Sunlight site, developing advanced digital capabilities, and recruiting specialist fragrance talent.

The new facility will feature a fragrance research and innovation lab, a compounding facility for blending new scents, and evaluation suites for product performance testing. It will be digitally enabled end-to-end, utilizing robotics for blending fragrance oils, real-time data capture, and artificial intelligence to drive development. Subject to planning permission, the site will support Unilever’s Home Care, Personal Care, and Beauty & Wellbeing brands, including Persil, Dove, Rexona (Sure in the UK), and Tresemme.

Unilever is hiring industry-leading perfumers, fragrance evaluators and ingredient technologists for the specialist team. Richard Slater, chief R&D officer at Unilever, stated: “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”.

The project forms part of a wider £300 million ($382 million) investment by Unilever in the UK over the next two years.

Source: Unilever