Leading creation and building differentiation

Innovation is central to our business growth and to guaranteeing superior solutions for our customers. With our partners in innovation, we aim to be at the forefront of fastchanging trends and challenge ourselves to go beyond.

We continue to lead the way in innovation, acting as an enabler for industry collaboration and co-creation. In 2019, we further strengthened our global innovation ecosystem with the opening of our flagship Zurich Innovation Centre. This newest addition to our global network of research and creation centres is designed to leverage our expertise in flavours, fragrances, active cosmetic ingredients and natural solutions, and will enable closer collaboration and co-creation with our customers, partners and start-ups.

CHF million invested in our flagship innovation centre in Kemptthal, Switzerland 120

% innovation resources dedicated to research in Naturals* 95%

CHF million investment in fragrance encapsulation centre, Singapore 15

Number of Fragrance Creative Centres worldwide 16

The new centre in Switzerland allows us to take new ideas and leverage our market-leading knowledge and expertise to scale them up and create new commercial solutions quickly as well as providing a space to work on open innovation with key partners and across our global science and technology community. The Zurich Innovation Centre now supports them in developing new captive molecules exclusive to our perfumers, implementing rules around green chemistry and leveraging the use of biotechnology for fragrances.

As part of our strategy of collaborative innovation we have teamed up with Bühler to accelerate market access for Swiss food start-ups. Both companies host and mentor entrepreneurs at their respective innovation centres in Switzerland, offering the start-ups their respective areas of expertise and the support they need to scale-up and commercialise their solutions that address our global food challenges. And our participation as co-founder in Future Food Initiative, together with Nestlé, Bühler, ETH Zurich and EPFL, will enable us to focus on advancing food and nutrition research to address the global challenges of healthy food production, affordable nutrition and sustainable supply chains. We have identified and sponsored fellowships in the area of smart packaging and nutrition.

We seek strategic partnerships with key suppliers so they become in effect an extension of our business. Currently, 50% of our priority projects leverage this sort of external collaboration. And through supplier-enabled innovation we can increase our intellectual resources and innovation momentum. Alongside this approach we ensure our Procurement, Science & Technology and Commercial teams work together so we can focus on value and accelerate the pace and quality of ideation.

Over the past few years digital has emerged as an opportunity to innovate differently. At its core, it brings more agility and enables us to respond more quickly to changing customer and consumer needs. It means harnessing the potential of artificial intelligence, big data and a multitude of emerging technologies such as ‘Carto’, a new tool that takes the best of both worlds of human creativity and computing power to redefine the

creation experience for our perfumers and flavourists; and our Aroma Kiosk integrates our VAS technology with an artificial intelligence interface, enabling a new form of consumer-facing capture of market insights.

Because the digital world moves at a fast pace, it requires us to go further in how we experiment and speedily bring products, ideas and solutions to our customers. This is the role of our Digital Factory, inaugurated in 2019, which allows us to accelerate our projects, help us to capitalise on these digital opportunities and further expand into innovative spaces. The Digital Factory brings together experts, partners, customers, start-ups and internal teams from all over the world in an innovation ecosystem.

Increasing our co-innovation efforts

For Givaudan, partnerships are crucial in accessing the latest trends in innovation, in driving business growth and ensuring a sustainable future.

We recognise the need to go beyond our internal capabilities and seek innovative partnerships, and so in Flavours we are building a global network of accelerators and incubators that enable us to leverage the entrepreneurial and innovative ideas that start-ups have to offer. This co-innovation network now includes MISTA, Bits x Bites and MassChallenge.

Through MassChallenge we have piloted Intrapreneurships, which offer the use of our infrastructure to accelerate entrepreneurship within

USA MISTA

Givaudan. An example is FoodUnite, a tool that standardises language for taste in the way that Pantone is used for colour. This promising start-up is led by a Givaudan employee.

Our recent partnerships with The Kitchen and StartLife form part of our wider commitment to address global food challenges. The Kitchen will enable us to further expand our innovation ecosystem by connecting with entrepreneurs who are contributing to the creation of healthier and sustainable products and solutions. StartLife will enable us to engage with emerging start-ups on the Wageningen campus, which is becoming a hot-spot of food science and foodtech activity in the Netherlands.

For our Fragrance Division, we entered a strategic relationship to extend our capabilities in Active Beauty. Our partnership with Bio FD&C in 2019 enables us to expand our capabilities in health and well-being, and benefit from Bio FD&C’s unique innovation capabilities to develop the cosmetic ingredients of the future.

Belgium EIT Food

The Netherlands StartLife

Switzerland Mass Challenge & Kickstart

Israel The Kitchen

South Korea Bio FD&C

China Bits x Bites