Built on the backbone of over 20 years of innovation, biotech manufacturer Geno has been making great strides as of late—whether it’s commercializing palm oil alternatives with Unilever or closing a $118 million Series C funding round. One of its recent projects is Brontide, a more natural and sustainable solution to butylene glycol, which serves as a humectant skin conditioner, solvent, and product thinning agent in eye and base color cosmetics, fragrances, and other personal care products. The market revenue of butylene glycol is expected to reach $269.1 million by 2030, but the ingredient is traditionally derived from fossil fuel-sourced acetaldehyde.
Geno’s Brontide, created through fermentation processes with natural renewable sugars (harvested from EU wheat and corn), was developed five years ago, meeting acclaim such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 2020 Green Chemistry Challenge Award. Given its source of a plentiful and commoditized crop, Brontide also has vast international production potential, rather than being limited to one specific country of production.
Now Geno is delving further into its application potential for perfumery, putting hard numbers to Brontide’s sustainability claims and weighing up its impact on fragrance (clarity, solubility, and organoleptic blotter evaluation), thanks to joint experiments alongside Memory Olfaction Creatively Applied (MOCA) Fragrances. Going without the “ols” in perfumery would be the metaphorical equivalent of clipping a bird’s wings, taking away that which largely renders the formulation airborne, so alternatives are clearly needed. “The fragrance industry has this foundation of synthetic petrochemical-based ingredients that they are trying to move away from, but it's pretty hard because they are a lot further behind in terms of sustainability. There's an expectation of the consumer that the fragrance ingredients should be further along in terms of their journey to be more sustainable and natural, and that's where we've come in,” states Kyle Huston, Product Director at Geno.
Aside from Coty’s and LanzaTech’s carbon-captured ethanol, another hugely popular alcohol-based fragrance ingredient, there has indeed been rather slow progress in terms of offering more eco-friendly alternatives. Commenting on this challenge, Huston notes, “It’s two-fold. People don't understand what other alternatives are out there and how they can be used at scale. The other piece is cost; that consumers ultimately have to pay for it. We don't have a lot of transparency into fragrances not being natural. In cosmetics, people are willing to pay for natural skincare and cosmetics, but there’s a lack of education for fragrances.”
Brontide’s sustainability benefits include reducing global greenhouse gas emissions by 50%, or 100,000 tons annually. Furthermore, in comparison to two natural diluents (benzyl benzoate and isopropyl myristate) and dipropylene glycol, studied across 900 data points, Brontide outperformed these materials while having no negative impact on fragrance note presentation―presenting them either just as clearly as its counterparts or in some cases, even more distinctly. The report states that Brontide performs best with lower molecular weight and lower logP (short for octanol-water partition coefficiency, or a molecule’s hydrophilia/hydrophobia) value ingredients.
Brontide’s diluent organoleptic and solvency performance rating when mixed with 105 common fragrance ingredients was 9.7/10 versus 9.6/10 for dipropylene glycol, 8.9/10 for benzyl benzoate, and 8.8./10 for isopropyl myristate. As fragrance is a delicate balance, this finding is especially of interest to consumers who don’t want to compromise on perfume performance or sillage, as often “clean” or all-natural perfumes can have less wear time or projection than their more synthetic counterparts. "It was another tool for our customers; even the big fragrance houses like International Flavors & Fragrances, Inc., (IFF), Symrise, Firmenich, and Givaudan, because they're trying desperately to achieve their corporate sustainability goals or natural indices for their products. This actually worked, where other ingredients before were maybe incomplete in terms of performance,” Huston adds. Furthermore, as Brontide simply requires an ingredient swap, rather than entire reformulation, it’s also an easy-access route to a more sustainable supply chain, enabled through the power of biotech.
Fragrance ingredient innovation and sustainability leveraging throughout the entire supply chain have been consistently growing, and with creations like Brontide, the gap between perceived “all-natural” sustainability and the chemist’s lab is becoming increasingly smaller. “Cosmetics is demanding natural and sustainable more than most other markets, but what we found was that the fragrance market was lacking natural tools. This is why you're hearing the pushback from the fragrance folks, because that industry has been insulated from the transparency that the personal care market has had for the past 10 years or so,” he comments.
As for the price of Brontide versus its more established counterparts, Huston adds that “It's fairly comparable. We know that the willingness to pay for sustainability and natural is something like 10 or 20 percent. We had to create a product that worked as well, or better, in order to have people pay anything for it. There’s some trust that needs to be given to a new innovation, so we were pretty deliberate on how we approached the marketplace in terms of the value and price.”
Given the high cost of research and development, affordability plays a huge role in industry-wide adoption. “The newness comes from the technology becoming more accessible. Fifteen years ago, it was way too expensive to do a lot of the things that we're doing today,” he explains. Aside from Brontide, Geno’s other endeavors include creating natural nylon with partner and investor Lululemon, plus a joint venture with Unilever to remake surfactants. “That’s something we’re pretty proud of―touching on a lot of these big brands to make big impacts in the industry. Incremental technology improvements, but at scale, make a big impact,” Huston enthuses. As the scientific and creative wheels continue to turn, it will be interesting to see what ingredient innovations the future of fragrance holds.
