Market and consumer needs are rapidly changing, with a stronger emphasis on health, wellbeing, and sustainability. In parallel, the European Green Deal regulations on ingredient requirements will begin to take effect in early 2022. Meeting these demands—both from consumers and regulatory bodies—requires product reformulation or process adjustment. Digital olfaction provides easy-to-implement data and workflow to support manufacturers as they evolve their products in reaction to these changes.
Reformulation of a product to meet a regulatory profile like those proposed in the Green Deal is often even more challenging than new product development. Because in this case, reformulation requires a manufacturer to accurately reproduce the sensory characteristics of a fragrance so that the consumer won’t notice the changes in his or her preferred product.
Digital olfaction allows teams to quickly and objectively screen a large number of reformulations, compare them both to the “original reference” and with each other. In this use case, digital olfaction can also track fragrance evolution that compares the unraveling and silage of different formulations.
A major global trend across industries is an increased focus on natural, sustainably sourced products that have minimal impact on scarce natural resources. But nature can be variable and unstandardized. Natural products all come with different characteristics depending on year, production location, natural events, etc. However, consumers often expect a consistent end product—even when manufactured with these natural ingredients.
Raw materials suppliers can leverage digital olfaction tools to categorize different types of variations—from minor fluctuations to defects—coming from their naturals and in the future providing AI-based insights on how to best correct this variability.
On the production line, digital olfaction provides additional data for cleaning validation after wash outs between production runs to optimize water consumption without impacting product quality. For example, an un-optimized clean-in-place application can overuse of 100’s of gallons of water resources to prevent the risk of under-rinsing and cross-contamination between subtly flavored beverages. Analysis of washout with digital olfaction would allow manufacturers to ensure that the proper amount of material has been flushed through the system—minimizing these risks while ensuring product quality.
In the automotive space, restrictions on vehicle materials have led to process changes for many interiors, such as leather. With standards that cover everything from water consumption, recycled content, chemical treatments and drying systems, digital olfaction allows suppliers to link ecology-driven alterations to the leather process to the end product odor.
Sustainability initiatives are only growing—and becoming further reaching as regulatory bodies, consumers and communities demand responsible manufacturing and production from companies across a wide array of industries. By leveraging consistent, objective odor data, organizations can fine tune their processes to ensure that they don’t sacrifice end-product quality and consistency while meeting these goals.
