With their constant innovations and breakthroughs, the industries of personal care and food technology never fail to fascinate. Now, meet the people who work hard to blend the subtleties of taste and smell into our personal care products.

By Lim Yan Wen

If you have ever wondered how toothpaste gets its flavour and the liquid soap has its fragrance, a career at Symrise will be an adventure.

Alice Leong graduated from Singapore Polytechnic (SP) with a diploma in Food Technology in 2002 and joined Symrise as an Application Technician. Today, Alice has completed her training by Symrise and works as a Junior Flavourist within the Scent & Care Division. She shares that it was by sheer coincidence that she returned to Symrise for a permanent job, having done her school attachment with this global leader in fragrances and flavours.

“The team here is very united and cooperative. All the colleagues and bosses provide a conducive working environment and give me a lot of support in my area of work,” Alice explains, with regard to the draw of working in Symrise.

Create and evaluate
Dressed in her white laboratory coat, Alice looks every bit the scientist of flavours. Her enthusiasm for her work is evident as she discusses her day at Symrise. Alice’s job scope mainly involves applying flavours into oral care products such as toothpastes and mouthwashes. However, she also does housekeeping for the raw materials library in Symrise, where hundreds of smell and flavour samples are kept.

Alice’s portfolio has recently expanded to include Creation, which is slightly different from Application and requires an ability to create flavours. “I’m still quite new to the creation part, so I find myself faced with some constraints. I have to do both new ideas creations and flavour matching work, and for a greenhorn like me, it’s quite a challenge,” she says.

She overcomes the challenges by constantly consulting her seniors and trying persistently until she gets the flavour right.

Perhaps what is most interesting about her recent role as Junior Flavourist is the after-application process where she and her colleagues blend the flavour into a product’s base, and the team will evaluate the quality of their work by sampling the end product.

“The team will do regular product evaluation by tasting, brushing or gargling, and discuss about the flavour’s performance. Based on the comments, we (Flavourists) will do further thinking and work to add the desired characters into the flavour formulations. Such constant on-site assessment and development work give me a good ground to improve my skill and knowledge as a Flavourist.” Alice says.

Always inspiring more
Evaluating the product quality is all in a day’s work at Symrise.

For Fragrance Development Manager Chong Kim Lian, her specialisation in soaps sees her conducting individual washes on her forearms or panel tests with her colleagues. These tests are essential for determining if the product’s quality is consistent, as well as gauging whether the selected scent fits the product marketing concept and the market. Her strong knowledge of consumer scent preferences in various countries is essential for her to successfully qualify the fragrance of choice.

As one of the leading European suppliers in the flavours sector, Symrise possesses the technology and resources to create and develop products that are cutting-edge and well-suited to market demands. The Symrise office in Singapore gets its supply of toothpaste from its headquarters in Germany, where they have the facilities and raw materials to manufacture their own toothpaste base for flavor evaluation purposes.

Apart from oral care products, Symrise is also a leading supplier of flavours such as vanilla, mint and citrus in the food technologies industry.

With this global presence and diverse range of products, Symrise was a natural choice for Kim Lian, who was also impressed with the company's technological excellence. Symrise's competitive advantage of having a range of raw cosmetics ingredients also reinforces their leading position in the market.

In 1992, Kim Lian graduated from SP where she majored in Food Science and Technology. The compulsory industrial attachment she served opened doors for her in the flavours and fragrances industry and exposed her to companies such as Symrise. “The two months of industrial training allowed me to acquire hands-on experiences in real-life working situations,” Kim Lian reveals.

She had singled out the personal care industry because of her attraction to smells. “Fragrance is a product category that most people use every day and is related to everyone. I really like the nice smells in products that I like and which people use every day,” she adds.

Today, her job scope has manifold facets. She works closely with perfumers to develop fragrances by sharing market products, consumer knowledge and setting performance benchmarks and standards. Kim Lian also manages the fragrance development process of all departments in the creative process, such as sales, applications and marketing.

Kim Lian has been dealing with soap for the past six years, and she recalls fondly how one particular fragrance of sandal soap they had developed for the Indian market is still selling very well today.

“Part of my job satisfaction comes from seeing the fragrances I have recommended get adopted in the market, because it shows how our acumen for market trends has become more sensitive over time,” shares the 37-year-old.

Alice agrees, recalling an initiative that had given her some overseas exposure. By a stroke of inspiration, she had blended Chinese pear with plum and it was adopted into a new toothpaste flavour in China. “I think it’s very satisfying when I know that customers appreciate our work and buy the products from the company,” she says.

As bright as ever
In the future, Alice still sees herself contributing to the oral care industry, which she believes is “as bright as ever”, as it constantly looks for new trends in Asia and all around the world, and aligns technological developments with market demand.

As for Kim Lian, she looks forward to perhaps becoming a Category Leader. “If given the opportunity, I would also like to be trained as a perfumer and learn to create fragrances for personal and home care industries from a wide pallet of raw materials,” she says.