Salons, sweat rooms, and humidified control labs make up some of the 500,000 square meters of innovation space at Unilever's largest research and development center in the world. Located in Liverpool, England, the Port Sunlight campus is considered Unilever’s R&D home and the largest of six R&D sites that make up its global network, from Trumbull, Connecticut, in the US to Shanghai, China, and Bangalore, India.
The Port Sunlight site was first established in 1888 by British manufacturing company Lever Brothers, with the first dedicated R&D center opening in 1911. Lever Brothers merged with Dutch company Margarine Unie in 1929 to form Unilever. Today, the R&D campus spends millions each year—€863 million ($962.7 million) in 2025—on research, development, and innovation projects across Unilever's current home care, personal care, beauty, and well-being portfolios.
“Port Sunlight is really end-to-end, from conception all the way through to product innovation, to manufacturing, to the shelf, and beyond,” said Dr. Jason Harcup, Chief R&D Officer of Beauty and Wellbeing at Unilever. Addressing a small group of journalists in one of the site's hair salons, Harcup said that everything at Port Sunlight is geared to support Unilever's power brands.
Within beauty and well-being, R&D efforts are funneled into major brands like Dove, Sunsilk, Vaseline, K18, Tresemmé, and Nutrafol, with innovation and testing across skincare, haircare, and ingestibles, offering plenty of crossover in functional, active, and fragrance ingredients. “Beauty and well-being are absolutely interconnected,” Harcup said. “And I believe, with the evolution we've had in the last few years, that we are in a position where we are understanding that wiring so much more, not just in Unilever but across the science economy.”
So, what will Unilever focus investment on over the coming years? And what exactly is the vision for such an important R&D hub?
BeautyMatter sat down with Harcup to discuss future plans.
In a large, sunlit boardroom at the Materials Innovation Factory, part of Unilever's R&D campus located at the University of Liverpool, the executive said Unilever's beauty and well-being business receives a significant amount of the annual budget for R&D.
“Beauty and well-being has a much higher clinical load, obviously, than something like homecare, even personal care. The biology and the investments you've got to make are much greater,” he said.
The wider beauty and well-being category also has a “ferocious SKU count,” Harcup explained, with almost one million SKUs across the industry. “When you've got that competitive ferocity, and then you've got almost a million legitimate business cases that could appear. If you look at climate, ethnicity, the benefits space, the life stage, the format, the API [Application Programming Interfaces], the channel, etc.—they multiply up to millions of business cases—your foundational spend has to be higher.”
Within beauty and well-being innovation, he said there is, of course, a lot of knowledge transfer with subjects like surfactants, colloid science, proteomics, lipidomics, and delivery systems, but plenty of new work is also needed, especially around active ingredients.
Unilever's current €94.6 million ($105.5 million) investment to build a new fragrance facility at Port Sunlight, due to be completed early next year, will help build towards this mission. “Fragrance is something we spend a great deal of money on; it's central to desire,” Harcup said. Fragrance research, he explained, is especially key given how volatile fragrance compounds are and how different molecular weights can be compared to other key ingredients—both aspects that can create stability, manufacturing, and acceptability challenges.
Today, Unilever works with a number of master perfumers and fragrance experts, both internal and external, as well as cosmetic chemists and scientists to develop scented products. The goal of the new fragrance house is to better merge these capabilities and approach product design “holistically,” he said.
The collaboration with the University of Liverpool via the company's Materials Innovation Factory (MIF), Harcup said, will also continue to be key to successful future innovations. “In this corner of the UK, which is an incredibly innovation-rich corner, historically and currently, I feel we've got strong loyalty to the area and strong relationships. I want this to become bigger and bigger and more fertile,” Harcup said.
In a ground-floor meeting room at the MIF, Dr. Paul Jenkins, Head of Physical and Chemical Sciences for Beauty and Wellbeing at Unilever, outlined the inner workings of the hub. Jenkins said the site, established in 2017, is dedicated to advancing materials science and digital discovery, developing new ingredients and formulations that can later be used and scaled at Port Sunlight. With an average of 250 researchers working there each day—both from Unilever and the university—the team has contributed to around 350 patents in the last five years alone. But it's not just humans working; the factory has the highest concentration of robots doing materials chemistry in the world.
“It is one of the world's leading centers of computer-aided materials science,” Jenkins said. “It has been copied in other countries across the world; China, for example, has invested in very similar facilities recently, as well as the US, Canada, Switzerland, and Germany. This is a really cutting-edge site.”
Leading the small group of media members—safety coats and goggles on—into a humidity controlled test lab, Richard Barfoot, Senior Research Scientist at Unilever, introduced MIF team members before a run-through of some of the next-generation technologies and robots innovating in materials science. Certain robots, for example, help the teams test hair fiber health as well as hair strength pre- and post-treatment; computers guide quick digital analysis of ingredient and formulation performance; and complex equipment enables scientists to zoom in on internal hair structures, mapping the molecular science of hair. “There are not many labs with this type of equipment for hair research,” Barfoot said.
Ning Guo, Global Technical Project Leader for Beauty and Wellbeing at Unilever, agrees, outlining the depth of research the MIF team goes into when studying hair. “At Unilever, we study hair fiber from every angle: biologically, chemically, and mechanically. This allows us to understand what happens to the hair fiber, but also why, so we can design the right technology to deliver benefits to our consumers,” Guo said. This level of research, she said, has enabled the development of various technologies, including Keratin Resistance Technology used in Unilever's Nexxus Keraphix Damage Repair collection, for example.
Hair fiber seems like a very simple structure, but when studied under a microscope, it is in fact a “very fascinating and complex structure,” Guo said.
Back in the boardroom, Harcup said that [MIF’s] goal over the next three to five years at the Materials Innovation Factory and Port Sunlight is to continue this depth of scientific research across all areas of beauty and well-being. For him, fragrance is a key opportunity for Unilever, given the desirability it brings to products in such a competitive space, and the emerging opportunities in neurochemistry. Unilever has already developed its mood-boosting fragrance technology Emotiwaves, for example, to connect scent with emotional well-being, he said. The microbiome is also a core area that will continue to be central to scientific advances at Unilever across skincare, scalp care, haircare, ingestibles, well-being, hygiene, and even homecare.
More broadly, Harcup said longevity and how this science interacts with the environment, life stages, and ethnicity will be an important research topic moving forward for Unilever; particularly hair longevity, which he said is “very underserved.”
For now, work at MIF will continue uncovering new materials, and efforts at Port Sunlight will maintain focus on trialing, testing, and scaling product concepts, while the fragrance house will bring new capabilities next year—all working to feed into the burgeoning €13 billion ($14.5 billion) Unilever business that is its Beauty and Wellbeing division.