IFF: Fragrance Ingredients, Perfumers, and the Technology Behind Scent

“A perfume contains endless combinations with the power to rouse the most diverse sensibilities.”
Dominique Ropion — IFF’s announcement of his Fragrance Foundation award, June 5, 2019

A bottle of perfume brings together people who grow flowers, extract ingredients, create new molecules, and compose them into scents. IFF is a fragrance company connecting these different kinds of work. Its synthetic-ingredient research and its Grasse-based natural-materials division, LMR, produce materials by different methods that become tools for the same creative work in perfumers’ hands.

Behind it lies the merger of a Dutch fruit-essence company and an American business supplying scents for perfumes and everyday products. Added to this is the story of Monique Rémy, a woman who pursued purity and transparency in natural ingredients. Understanding IFF reveals the journey from materials to compositions that perfume brand names alone rarely show.

Key Facts and IFF Today
Milestones
A Company Born from Fruit Essences and Everyday Scents
1. The 1889 Predecessor and the 1958 Merger
2. Expansion into Flavors, Nutrition, and Biotechnology
Monique Rémy and the Natural Ingredients of LMR
1. From Analytical Chemistry to an Independent Pursuit of Purity
2. An Aubrac Extraction Factory and the IFF Acquisition in 2000
How Origins and Extraction Choices Change a Composition
Synthetic Ingredients and Research into Living Flowers
1. A New Woody Material Behind Halston
2. 1998: Investigating a Rose’s Scent in Space
Perfumery Education in Partnership with ISIPCA
References

Key Facts and IFF Today

Official name: International Flavors & Fragrances Inc.
Abbreviation: IFF
Formation of IFF: 1958, through the merger of Polak & Schwarz and van Ameringen-Haebler
Location: United States; principal executive offices in New York and Wilmington, Delaware
Natural-ingredients division: LMR Naturals by IFF, founded by Monique Rémy in 1983 and acquired by IFF in 2000
Official website: IFF

IFF is a US company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Its continuing operations currently center on three areas: Taste, covering food flavors; Scent, covering perfumes, everyday-product fragrances, and fragrance ingredients; and Health & Biosciences, covering enzymes, cultures, health-related materials, and other products.

In May 2026, IFF announced an agreement to sell its Food Ingredients business. Its August announcement expected completion by the end of the second quarter of 2027. Scent, the business most closely associated with perfume, composes fragrance formulas and develops and supplies natural and synthetic ingredients. Within it, LMR connects plant origins, cultivation, extraction, and purification with perfumery.

Milestones

1889 — Joseph Polak and Leopold Schwarz establish Polak & Schwarz in the Netherlands, supplying fruit flavors and essences.
1917 — Arnold Louis van Ameringen moves to the United States, later building his own fragrance business.
1958 — Polak & Schwarz and van Ameringen-Haebler merge to form International Flavors & Fragrances, or IFF.
1973–1975 — Iso Cyclemone E, patented in 1973, leads to the later Iso E Super. Halston, released in 1975, demonstrates the ingredient’s expressive possibilities.
1982 — IFF works with Yale University on aroma science, studying the effects of scent on human emotions.
1983 — Monique Rémy establishes LMR in Grasse, pursuing pure, high-quality natural ingredients.
1985 — Living Flower technology is developed to capture and analyze the aromatic components released by living flowers, informing their reconstruction. It emerges from research by Braja Mookherjee and colleagues.
1987 — Fragrance Resources, which later joins IFF, is founded.
1998 — An experiment aboard Space Shuttle mission STS-95 studies the aromatic components of a rose.
2000 — IFF acquires LMR, followed by Bush Boake Allen in November, expanding its foundations in natural ingredients, flavors, and fragrances.
2015 — The acquisition of US flavor company Ottens is completed on May 1.
2016 — The joint Scent Design & Creation course with ISIPCA begins.
2017 — The acquisition of Fragrance Resources is completed on January 17. IFF University also begins, bringing together internal management education, technical education, and specialist-skills training.
2018 — The Frutarom acquisition is completed on October 4.
2021 — The combination with DuPont’s Nutrition & Biosciences business is completed on February 1, broadening operations into food ingredients, enzymes, and related fields.
2025 — The sale of Pharma Solutions is completed on May 1.
2026 — On May 28, LMR opens experimental farmland in Grasse for cultivation and ingredient research. The following day, IFF announces an agreement to sell Food Ingredients to funds managed by CVC. Its August announcement expects completion by the end of the second quarter of 2027.

A Company Born from Fruit Essences and Everyday Scents

The 1889 Predecessor and the 1958 Merger

One starting point in IFF’s history is Polak & Schwarz, founded in the Netherlands in 1889 by Joseph Polak and Leopold Schwarz. Handling fruit flavors and essential oils, it expanded the work of supplying taste and aroma to food.

Arnold Louis van Ameringen, who worked for the company, became involved in its US operations in 1917 and subsequently established his own company. Soap manufacturers were among those he approached during the 1920s. Scenting everyday products was one way fragrance companies entered people’s lives.

Flavor specialist Polak & Schwarz and fragrance-focused van Ameringen-Haebler merged in 1958 to form IFF. This origin connects with the present company’s work on both things we eat and things we wear or use in daily life.

Expansion into Flavors, Nutrition, and Biotechnology

IFF completed its acquisition of Frutarom on October 4, 2018, and its combination with DuPont’s Nutrition & Biosciences business on February 1, 2021. Adding nutrition and bioscience operations broadened its scope beyond flavors and fragrances into food functionality, fermentation, and health-related materials.

Business restructuring followed, with the Pharma Solutions sale completed on May 1, 2025. The Food Ingredients sale agreement belongs to this process. Today’s IFF is shaped not only by expansion, but also by renewed decisions about where to concentrate its efforts.

Monique Rémy and the Natural Ingredients of LMR

From Analytical Chemistry to an Independent Pursuit of Purity

Monique Rémy began in pharmaceutical chemical analysis, worked at Unilever’s Paris laboratory, and then moved to Grasse ingredient company Bertrand Frères. There she established analytical facilities for separating and examining components.

Later, as technical director at Camilli, Albert & Laloue, she gained experience in ingredients and their processing. Confronting declining natural-ingredient quality, she placed purity at the heart of her work. Laboratoire Monique Rémy, founded in Grasse in 1983, became LMR.

Her first customer was Chanel, to which she supplied jasmine, orange-blossom, and rose absolutes. An absolute is a natural ingredient obtained by further refining aromatic substances extracted from plants. Transparency about composition and earning perfumers’ trust through the materials’ own quality were LMR’s starting points.

Rémy visited producing regions directly and signed long-term contracts with farmers. The prospect of sustained purchases makes it easier for growers to continue cultivating fragrance plants. Securing reliable ingredients and supporting work in their places of origin were not separate concerns. LMR also invested in harvesting and processing research, improving cultivation and harvesting methods for materials such as iris.

An Aubrac Extraction Factory and the IFF Acquisition in 2000

In 1984, LMR began working with SADEV, a small extraction factory in Aumont-Aubrac, France, and acquired it in 1997. Handling local narcissus, jonquil, and tree moss, the site also became a place to test extraction techniques.

IFF acquired LMR in 2000. Rémy did not leave immediately, supporting the transition for approximately three years. IFF’s perfumers were also seeking natural materials. Their wish to expand their tools with Rémy’s ingredients alongside excellent synthetics helped bring the two businesses together.

Using IFF’s research, funding, and procurement network, LMR has developed its natural-ingredient expertise and long-term relationships with producers. It expanded its Grasse site in 2025 and opened the Domaine des Naturels LMR experimental field in May 2026. The site studies fragrance from the cultivation stage and shares knowledge with perfumers and partners.

One way this knowledge reaches readers is through the Nez+LMR — The Naturals Notebook series. Following each material from its origins through processing, culture, and perfumery, the books explore the people and technologies behind natural ingredients rather than simply teaching their names.

How Origins and Extraction Choices Change a Composition

Narcissus from Lozère, Finished in Aubrac and Grasse

Narcissus is one of the materials with which LMR has long worked. In France’s Lozère region, long-term contracts with landowners have supported improved harvesting methods and traceability of the flowers’ origins.

Harvested flowers go directly to the Aumont-Aubrac facility, where solvents extract aromatic and other components to form a concrete. This is then refined with alcohol in Grasse to produce an absolute. Initial processing takes place where the flowers grow, connecting with Grasse’s purification expertise.

LMR describes this narcissus as a rich green floral scent with hay and honey facets. These characteristics offer clues different from what its white flowers alone might suggest. Looking at which plant parts are extracted, and by which methods, makes a natural ingredient’s name more concrete.

Selecting the Heart of a Scent to Meet Perfumers’ Requests

Natural extracts contain multiple facets. A request might seek patchouli‘s woody aspect while reducing its earthy side. LMR examines the components and selects the desired aromatic groupings. Molecular distillation and fractionation support these choices.

“We use it by the order of perfumers—sometimes they need special materials.”
Bertrand de Préville — Sergey Borisov’s Fragrantica interview on LMR’s technology and natural ingredients

Molecular distillation separates components under low pressure, while fractionation divides them into groups. Changing the selected fraction yields different expressive tools from the same plant. Geranium Heart Egypt, announced in 2026, was designed to suggest lychee without the usual minty facet.

“These products require relearning. Compositions must be rebalanced.”
Bertrand de Préville, LMR general manager — The Fragrance Foundation France, October 6, 2025 (translated from French)

A new material cannot necessarily replace an earlier one at the same dosage. If extraction or purification shifts its olfactory focus, its relationships with surrounding ingredients also change. Dialogue is needed between ingredient makers and the perfumers who use their work.

Ropion’s LMR Ingredients and the Moment Before a Kiss

Dominique Ropion joined IFF in 2000 and became a master perfumer there in 2018. In D’ORSAY‘s Sur tes lèvres. E.Q., he sought to express the sensation of entrusting one’s lips to another person.

To evoke the trembling moment before a kiss, Ropion used LMR pink pepper and ambrette. He contrasted the former’s fresh, slightly lemony quality with the latter’s warm, powdery facet. Beyond their quality, the contrast between the two materials was given a role in expressing the subject.

Iris and jasmine form the center. Iris’s silky powderiness envelops jasmine’s animalic energy. For iris, he selected two extracts, a concrete and a resinoid: the first adds lipstick-like delicacy, the second a slightly chocolate-like sensation. These distinctions between extracts are invisible in a simple list of ingredient names.

For Fleurs d’un Soir, created for the 2019 Fragrance Foundation ceremony, Ropion also used LMR iris, rose, and jasmine. Research into materials and relationships with growers thus reaches fragrances expressing a particular occasion or emotion.

Synthetic Ingredients and Research into Living Flowers

A New Woody Material Behind Halston

Alongside LMR’s naturals, IFF research has expanded the perfumer’s synthetic tools. One example is Iso Cyclemone E, patented in 1973, and the later improved material Iso E Super.

Creating Halston in 1975, IFF’s Bernard Chant and Max Gavarry worked on a woody chypre composition using this new material. Chypre is a fragrance family built around combinations of citrus, flowers, moss, and woods. In Gavarry’s trial formula, the new material replaced the violet-and-wood effect previously provided by methyl ionone.

“Even at that light dose, it pushed up all the flowers and gave the fragrance the distinction and signature that made the difference.”
John Dennis, then responsible for Halston at IFF — Michael Edwards’s account of the perfume’s creation

A new material’s value is not simply the novelty of its smell in isolation. How does it enhance other ingredients, and what character does it give the perfume as a whole? Discovering these relationships transfers research into a composition.

1998: Investigating a Rose’s Scent in Space

IFF also researched capturing the smells emitted by living flowers. Headspace analysis collects and examines volatile components in the air around a flower or other object, providing clues for reconstructing its smell.

In 1998, the small rose Overnight Scentsation traveled aboard Space Shuttle Discovery on STS-95. In collaboration with the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Wisconsin Center for Space Automation and Robotics, researchers investigated changes in its aromatic components under microgravity. A team including Dr. Braja Mookherjee sampled the flower’s emissions during flight and found a scent composition different from that on Earth.

The Space Rose scent developed through this research was used in Shiseido’s ZEN at the time. Using a natural extract from a flower and composing a scent from analysis of a living flower’s emissions are different approaches. There is more than one way to bring nature into perfume.

Perfumery Education in Partnership with ISIPCA

IFF also supports fragrance work through education. In 2016, it launched Scent Design & Creation jointly with ISIPCA. Combining ingredient recognition, formulation, scent evaluation, and interpretation of client needs, the course can lead not only to perfumery but also to development, evaluation, and related work.

This school–company partnership provides three years of English-language study, including practical work at IFF creative centers and instruction from perfumers. Applications and current recruitment information are available on ISIPCA’s course page. Different educational routes into perfumery are also covered in LCP’s guide to perfume and perfumer qualifications and education.

From plants in fields through extraction and analysis to a perfumer’s trials, IFF’s work shows that perfume rests on neither one person’s talent nor a single technology. It involves repeated exchanges between those who understand materials and those who seek to express something through them.