Firmenich's sourcing in India and Africa: lessons for smaller players

Firmenich (now part of DSM-Firmenich) is one of the handful of groups that dominate the global flavor and fragrance market. What fewer people know is how far a group of this size is willing to go to secure rare raw materials, including exploring unexpected olfactory leads directly in the field, in India as much as in Africa.

Direct sourcing as a competitive edge

Unlike part of the industry, which buys raw materials through intermediaries or brokers, groups the size of Firmenich invest heavily in direct sourcing, sending perfumers and raw material experts straight into production areas to identify new olfactory sources, understand local harvesting conditions, and build long-term relationships with producers.

This approach sometimes goes as far as exploring olfactory leads the general public wouldn’t spontaneously associate with luxury fragrance. Compounds of surprising origin can, once isolated and purified, reveal sought-after facets, a testament to the creativity needed to keep renewing the world’s olfactory palette as classic materials grow scarcer.

Why India and Africa in particular

These two geographies concentrate considerable olfactory biodiversity, still largely underexploited compared to production basins more historically integrated into the Western fragrance industry. For a group like Firmenich, sending teams there on direct exploration serves a dual logic: diversify supply sources increasingly under strain elsewhere, and get ahead of competitors in identifying new materials before they become market standards, a response to exactly the kind of structural raw material scarcity now affecting the wider industry.

The scale behind this strategy is real: dsm-firmenich reported full-year 2025 revenue of more than €12 billion, with its Perfumery & Beauty division posting 3% organic sales growth and Fine Fragrances growing at a high-single-digit rate, performance the group attributes partly to a strong Middle East market and solid demand across Asia (dsm-firmenich, FY2025 results). That kind of growth only intensifies the pressure to keep securing supply directly rather than through intermediaries.

What smaller players can take from this

Few organizations have the means to send olfactory exploration teams around the world. But the principle underlying this practice remains transferable at any scale: the value of a raw material is never limited to what the market already knows about it. A direct, trusted relationship with a local producer, even a modest one, can reveal opportunities that a simple purchase through an intermediary would never uncover.

For brands or mid-sized organizations looking to build a differentiated sourcing strategy in Africa or Asia, the lesson from Firmenich isn’t in the resources deployed, it’s in the method: go see for yourself, understand the ground, and build the relationship before you build the contract. It’s also a useful contrast with a different model followed by some luxury groups, investing capital into an already-independent niche brand rather than building direct sourcing in-house, and with the specific case of India’s sandalwood sector, where regulation rather than logistics has historically been the bottleneck.