Robertet: From Seed to Scent in Grasse

More than ever, our greatest strengths are our independence, our unique business model, and our long-term vision.
Philippe Maubert, Chairman of the Board (April 2026; translated from French)

Behind a perfume are people who grow flowers, extract their aromas, and combine the resulting ingredients. Based in Grasse, France, Robertet is a flavor and fragrance company that has connected this long journey within a single business. Founded in 1850, it brings together the history of the Robertet family, whose name it bears, and the Maubert family, whose work evolved from ingredient production into management. Today, its activities encompass natural ingredients, fragrance composition, food flavors, and ingredients for health and beauty.

Key Facts
The Founders and the Company’s Origins
Natural Ingredient Origins and Extraction and Fractionation
1. From Flower Fields to Ingredients
2. Refining Extracted Aromas for Perfumery
Perfumers and Their Use of Ingredients
Today’s Business
Milestones
References

Key Facts

Company: Robertet
Founded: 1850, originally as À La Confiance
Founder: François Chauve, who built the business with his nephew, perfumer and distiller Jean-Baptiste Maubert
Headquarters: Grasse, France
Activities: Natural ingredients, fragrances, food flavors, and health and beauty ingredients
Official website: Robertet

The Founders and the Company’s Origins

Grasse’s Flowers and À La Confiance

Fragrance production in Grasse begins before a finished perfume is bottled. It involves gathering locally grown flowers and leaves, preserving their aromas, and making ingredients available to perfumers far away. À La Confiance, established by François Chauve in 1850, was also a processor of Provençal flowers and plants. His nephew Jean-Baptiste Maubert was both a perfumer and a distiller. At the center of the early business stood someone who understood flowers and the techniques for extracting their scent.

Paul Robertet acquired the company in 1875, giving it the name it bears today. Its founding in 1850 and renaming in 1875 were not the same event. In 1883, its headquarters moved from Paris to Grasse, bringing the company’s base closer to the place where plants were processed.

Its work at the time extended beyond what we would now call fine-fragrance ingredients. In 1880, it patented a process for manufacturing instant coffee. This milestone shows how technologies for extracting useful substances from plants and making them manageable also extended beyond fragrance. Jean-Baptiste Maubert received a gold medal at the 1900 Paris Exposition.

Ingredient Production Passed Down through the Maubert Family

Jean-Baptiste’s son Maurice Maubert took over management in 1923. Natural ingredients are not necessarily finished simply because a plant has been processed. How accompanying color and other components are handled affects the ways perfumers can use them. Robertet developed processing technologies for natural materials, including Incolores in 1935 and Butaflors in 1950. Successive developments transformed materials from difficult-to-use states into forms easier to incorporate into formulas.

In 1961, the generation of Jean and Paul Maubert took over, expanding the business from natural ingredients into fragrance composition and food flavors. Creating scents for perfume and household-product manufacturers and flavors for food joined the ingredient division. Expansion across Europe, the Americas, and Asia connected expertise accumulated in Grasse with production and creation in other regions.

The Plan-de-Grasse factory opened in 1982, and the company listed on the Paris Stock Exchange in 1984. That was also the year the Maubert family acquired control of the company. Long-standing work and management within the business now coincided with control through share ownership.

Philippe Maubert took over management in 1993. His brothers Christophe and Olivier also participated in the business, whose activities later extended beyond natural ingredients, fragrances, and food flavors into health and beauty ingredients. Charabot, acquired in 2007, was a separate Grasse fragrance company founded in 1799. Its acquisition did not move Robertet’s own founding date backward; it brought the ingredients and expertise accumulated by another company into the group.

Family Succession and Professional Management

Jérôme Bruhat became Chief Executive Officer on July 1, 2022. Philippe, as Chairman of the Board, oversees the company’s long-term direction. Family continuity does not mean that every management role must be held by family members.

Philippe’s son Julien Maubert had known the company’s scents since childhood.

Even as a small child, I remember smells and wandering through Robertet’s corridors.
Julien Maubert (translated from French)

Julien had led the natural ingredients division since 2015. On January 1, 2026, he succeeded Christophe with responsibility for fragrances and sustainability. This succession brings experience in sourcing and processing flowers and leaves into a division focused on fragrance creation. Christophe remains involved as Vice-Chairman of the Board.

Developments concerning independence are also part of the company’s recent history. On November 14, 2024, plans were announced for FSP and Peugeot Invest to acquire shares held by dsm-firmenich and others. The transaction was conditional at that stage. The two subsequently joined as new investors, and on November 21, dsm-firmenich announced it had also sold its entire remaining stake. At the end of 2025, the Maubert family holding company and family members together held 62.3% of voting rights. Family-led direction continues alongside outside capital and professional management.

Natural Ingredient Origins and Extraction and Fractionation

From Flower Fields to Ingredients

Robertet calls its approach connecting seeds with fragrance “Seed to Scent.” It links sourcing, production, agricultural knowledge, quality, and environmental initiatives with the final creation of scent. In Grasse, it handles centifolia rose, jasmine, violet leaves, and other materials, while plants from around the world also become ingredients.

Its Bulgarian operation handles rose and lavender, providing advances for cultivation and replanting and support for irrigation equipment. In Tunisia, a partnership dating from 1999 supplies orange blossom and includes shared distillation facilities. In Madagascar, Fragrant Garden, established with a local family in 2009, works with ylang-ylang and patchouli. An ingredient’s origin is not merely a country on a map but also a relationship with the people who continue cultivating and harvesting it.

Refining Extracted Aromas for Perfumery

Extracting aroma from a plant and separating the resulting components are different processes. Fractionation separates components of a mixture to emphasize particular aromatic facets. Robertet’s Patchouli Fraction Oil uses vacuum fractionation of material obtained from Indonesian patchouli leaves, reducing earthiness and emphasizing woodiness. Its Petitgrain Paraguay Deterpenated Oil uses molecular distillation of bitter-orange leaf oil to remove terpenes. Refining the contours of natural materials broadens a perfumer’s expressive range.

New procedures are also emerging in flower processing. A patent application filed by Charabot and published in 2012 describes macerating flowers in alcohol, then using supercritical carbon dioxide to extract and purify their aromatic components. A supercritical state arises when temperature and pressure are adjusted so that a substance is neither an ordinary liquid nor gas. The process aims to recover aroma from the flower infusion and separate it from components such as sugars.

In June 2023, Robertet introduced CleanRscent, a series of absolutes produced without hexane, using a biodegradable solvent. The first materials presented included Bourbon vanilla and roasted tonka beans. Research into solvents and processing methods continues today.

Perfumers and Their Use of Ingredients

Michel Almairac and Chloé’s Rose

A wealth of natural materials does not mean that every formula is composed entirely of them. Each creation calls for a particular expression, and materials are selected accordingly. Chloé Eau de Parfum Naturelle, released in 2021, reinterpreted Chloé’s rose under the requirement of using 100% naturally derived ingredients.

Robertet perfumer Michel Almairac created it with a concise, rose-centered formula. Organic Bulgarian rose is combined with citron, neroli, blackcurrant, and other materials. The creation had to meet requirements concerning ingredient origin while also continuing Chloé’s established rose impression.

Sidonie Lancesseur and the Woods of the Sahara

Sidonie Lancesseur studied at ISIPCA, joined Robertet as an assistant in 2004, and became a perfumer in 2006. The concise approach to formulas she learned from Michel Almairac continues in her own work.

I always try to create perfumes with short formulas, where every ingredient has a reason to be there.
Sidonie Lancesseur (translated from French)

Anomalia Paris’s Sahara 4800 takes the route of the Dakar Rally as its subject, layering impressions of hot sand, leather, and minerals. The brand explains that it uses Robertet’s fractionated cedarwood and patchouli ingredients. Redistillation brings out cedarwood’s woody, leathery, and ambery facets, while vacuum distillation gives patchouli a clearer woody aspect.

Here, materials are not chosen simply because they are natural. Woody scents refined after extraction support the perfume’s expression of sand and leather. It is a concrete meeting between ingredient-processing technology and compositional choices.

Jérôme Epinette and Compositions with Few Materials

Jérôme Epinette grew up in Burgundy, where his mother worked in a perfumery. After studying biochemistry, he trained in perfumery in Grasse, joined Robertet’s Paris operation in 2003, and moved to its New York creative center in 2006. He, too, is a perfumer who learned from Almairac.

On natural and synthetic ingredients, Epinette puts it simply.

I’d say we need both, it’s as simple as that.
Jérôme Epinette

For Les Bains Guerbois’s 1900 L’Heure de Proust, he gave each of roughly twenty ingredients its own role. Bergamot’s brightness highlights a smoky black-tea heart, joined by vetiver’s earthy facet, palo santo’s smoke, and the surprise of blueberry. Rather than increasing the number of ingredients, the composition makes clear what each one does.

Robertet also provides a two-year in-house training program for perfumers, connecting it with its international creative centers. Approaches to formulas inherited from senior colleagues and experience with ingredients are passed on within the company to future creations.

Today’s Business

Consolidated sales for 2025 were €843.9 million. Natural ingredients accounted for 25%, food flavors 35%, fragrances 37%, and health and beauty ingredients 3%. These figures cover all four activities, not perfume alone.

Beginning as a company extracting aromas from flowers and leaves, Robertet went on to combine those materials for perfumes and food, and later to use plant components in health and beauty. Understanding an ingredient’s origin, processing it into a usable form, and enabling perfumers to create with it: this connection carries Robertet’s work, begun in Grasse, into creative activity around the world today.

Milestones

1799: Charabot, which will later join the group, is founded.
1850: François Chauve establishes À La Confiance, with Jean-Baptiste Maubert participating in the business.
1875: Paul Robertet acquires the company, which takes the Robertet name.
1880: A process for manufacturing instant coffee is patented.
1883: Headquarters move from Paris to Grasse.
1900: Jean-Baptiste Maubert receives a gold medal at the Paris Exposition.
1923: Maurice Maubert takes over management.
1935: The Incolores natural ingredient range is developed.
1950: Butaflors is developed.
1961: The generation of Jean and Paul Maubert takes over, expanding fragrance composition and food flavors.
1982: The Plan-de-Grasse factory opens.
1984: The Maubert family acquires control of the company. Robertet lists on the Paris Stock Exchange.
1993: Philippe Maubert takes over management.
2006: The New York creative center opens.
2007: Charabot is acquired. In December, a majority interest in organic ingredient company SAPAD is acquired.
2012: Charabot’s patent application combining alcoholic flower maceration with supercritical carbon dioxide extraction is published.
2021: Michel Almairac creates Chloé Eau de Parfum Naturelle.
July 1, 2022: Jérôme Bruhat becomes Chief Executive Officer.
June 2023: CleanRscent is introduced.
November 2024: FSP and Peugeot Invest join as new investors. On November 21, dsm-firmenich announces the sale of its entire stake.
January 1, 2026: Julien Maubert becomes head of the fragrance and sustainability divisions.