All you want to know about the fragrance industry is here!

Today, I will take you to the aroma, the story behind the fragrance, and talk about those things about the fragrance industry. For basic topics such as what perfumes are, please refer to the chemistry of aromas. For the history of synthetic perfumes, synthesis methods, and how to apply, please refer to the chemistry of aromas.


aroma

The sense of smell is one of the five major senses in the human body. Humans have 390 olfactory receptors (GPCRs) that can sense substances in the air. These olfactory receptors are equivalent to detectors with extremely high sensitivity. For example, as long as the concentration of ketones and some thiols containing grapefruit ketones [1] in the air reaches about 100 pt, people can perceive them. The concentration of 10ppt is equivalent to the concentration of the compound in the pool after 1 drop of the compound is dropped in a 25-meter standard swimming pool.


Classification of spices

Spices can be roughly divided into two categories: synthetic perfumes and natural perfumes.

Natural flavors are flavors obtained through steam distillation, extraction, and pressing. Therefore, the price, collection amount, and quality will change, and the price of flavors will also fluctuate and easily become higher. For example, muscone ((R)-3-methylcyclopentadecanone), a natural fragrance obtained from male musk deer, has been regarded as a rare fragrance because of its unique aroma and rarity. In order to obtain musk, people once hunted and killed musk deer on the brink of extinction. After the Washington Treaty was introduced, the hunting behavior was controlled and controlled. Therefore, most natural fragrances like musk are obtained through synthesis.

The output, aroma and quality of synthetic spices are stable, so the price fluctuates little and the price is low. There are 500 kinds of main synthetic fragrances. If you count some small ones, there are more than 3,000 kinds. Now the types of synthetic fragrances produced have greatly exceeded those of natural fragrances.

Spices have other uses, roughly divided into two categories: the flavor of the food we eat (food flavors, condiments) and perfume, the fragrance of toilet water, and the fragrance of detergents (cosmetic fragrances, perfumes). The market sizes of these two types of spices are about the same in the world, but Japanese perfume companies focus on the former.


Spice Company

Readers must be familiar with pharmaceutical companies, but how much do they know about fragrance companies? I surveyed some fragrance companies. To my surprise, most of them are European companies. Swiss and French companies have almost supported the fragrance industry. This is also expected, after all, the cutting-edge popularity of perfume comes from Paris Fashion Week. % Represents the market share.

First place, Givaudan (Swiss fragrance company), 19%

Givaudan is the world's largest perfume manufacturer and has a research institute outside Zurich, Switzerland.

Second place, Firmenich (Swiss fragrance company), 14%

Unlisted operating company.

Third place, IFF (International Flavors and Fragrances), located in New Jersey, USA, 12%

Fourth place, Symrise in Holzminden, Germany, 12%

In 1874, Tiemann and Haarmann began to synthesize vanillin industrially, and in 2002 the two merged to form Symrise Perfume Company.

5th place, Takasago Spice (Japan), 5%

It is famous for the industrial process of using Ru-BINAP catalyst to produce menthol.
Other spice companies include V. Mane Fils, a large-scale spice company in France, and Sensient Technologies in the United States. In addition to Takasago spice in Japan, there are Hasegawa spice, Ogawa spice, and Soda spice.


Characteristics of fragrance compounds

What kind of compounds can be used as spices? General perfumes are mostly volatile substances with a molecular weight between 100-300, and carbon atoms no more than 20. They are hydrophobic but also slightly soluble in water and can bind to olfactory receptors.

In fragrances, API (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients: active pharmaceutical ingredients that are the original drugs of pharmaceuticals) and Agrochemical (agrochemical fragrances) have very few molecules containing aromatic rings or molecules containing many heteroatoms (if the molecules contain A lot of heteroatoms make the molecule odorless. Most perfume molecules are composed of carbon atoms, hydrogen atoms, and oxygen atoms. Some perfume molecules contain nitrogen or sulfur atoms. Although there are few molecules with optical activity in molecules with lower molecular weights, there are exceptions: menthol, in some optically active molecules, substances composed of different optical isomer molecules have different odors.


Sniff-GC

Sniff-GC is used to analyze fragrances made by synthesis or extraction. Although analytical instruments have continued to improve in recent years, the human sense of smell is still more sensitive than the detectors of analytical instruments. Sniff-GC is an indispensable method for aroma analysis. Knowing the aroma (olfactory) and molecular mass of the substance, it is not difficult to infer which substance (GC-MS-O).

The smell we usually smell in our lives comes from a mixture of dozens or hundreds of compounds, so even if we feel very unpleasant, GC-MS-O analysis also shows that the mixture contains aromatic substances. Of course, there are also very unpleasant substances in this mixture. For details, please refer to the research on the odor components emitted by the giant flower konjac


The aroma of different compound combinations

The most important thing for perfume compounds is the combination of compounds. Spices are made by mixing multiple compounds in a certain proportion, so that a complex aroma that a single compound cannot emit can be obtained. This technique of combining different compounds comes from the training process of perfumers and the accumulation of procedural knowledge (know-how), so this technique of combining is not as simple and easy as we thought.

France and other countries have specialized perfumer colleges. To become a perfumer, you must first remember the names of more than 2,000 raw materials and their corresponding aromas, and then repeatedly practice using several to dozens of spices to blend the aromas. , Accumulate about 10 years of experience to become a qualified perfumer. It's really not easy to become a perfumer.


Spice synthesis process

When you synthesize volatile substances, if the amount of solvent is small, because the volatile substances will immediately volatilize and disappear, it is obvious that the synthesis is only a simple substance but unexpectedly failed. Have you ever encountered such things? A junior asked me what should I do if I accidentally pumped a vacuum when synthesizing volatile compounds and the compounds are gone.

Because of the volatile nature of perfume, it is not refined by crystallization method like API or Agrochemical, but refined by distillation. The difficulty in perfume manufacturing is that the distribution of impurities can adversely affect product quality. Especially for substances with a not very strong aroma, this problem is even more serious. Even 0.1% impurities that do not pose a threat to the safety of spices can make the aroma of the product very strange. In order to remove impurities, first reduce the separation yield by 10%, and then use precision distillation to remove 0.1% of impurities.

In terms of manufacturing cost, there is no need to control the cost at a low level like Agrochemical, but if the cost of the fragrance is as high as the API, it will not be sold, so the cost needs to be controlled between these two levels. In addition, when synthesizing fragrances, because there are too few oxygen-containing functional groups and heteroatoms that act as bases for connecting molecular fragments, it is very difficult to synthesize small molecules efficiently and short-path, so the development of the synthesis process depends on The chemists used their brains.


Spice industry

The perfume industry not only sells synthetic or isolated compounds from animals and plants, it also includes mixing different compounds into perfumes and then selling them, so the industry has a high threshold.

For the entire perfume industry, about 3000 kinds of flavoring compounds are used for flavoring agents, and approximately equal kinds of compounds are used for perfume production. At first glance, it seems that the source of spices is very rich, but in fact it is not. Take Japan, which has a smaller spice market, most spices are used in Japan in less than one ton a year. What's more, because of the strong smell, only one gram per year is enough. Therefore, small profits but quick turnover cannot be achieved, on the contrary, it can exist safely as a niche market.

Nowadays, there are few opportunities for the pharmaceutical industry to synthesize its own compounds to be sold on the market, but it is highly possible for the perfume industry to sell its own synthetic fragrances on the market. Although it is difficult to synthesize odorous compounds that evaporate as soon as they evaporate, isn't the fragrance industry a challenging and attractive industry?