30 июня, 2015 
Malyar ECONOMIC FACTORS AFFECTING PERFUME
INGREDIENT PRODUCTION
The four main factors that affect the volume of use of a fragrance ingredient are its odour contribution to a fragrance, its stability and performance in the products to be perfumed, its safety in use and its cost. The first three factors are discussed in the chapters on perfumery, applications, safety and ingredient design (Chapters 7, 9, 10 and 15, respectively). The fourth factor, cost, depends on raw material availability and chemical process technology, which are discussed in this chapter.
The fragrance industry lies between the petrochemical and pharmaceutical industries in terms of scale of production and cost per kilogramme of product. The production scale is closer to that of the pharmaceutical industry, but the prices are closer to those of the bulk chemicals industry.
The largest-volume fragrance ingredients are produced in quantities of 5000-6000 tonnes worldwide per annum, but some ingredients, mostly those with extremely powerful odours, which limit their use in a fragrance, are required in only kilogramme amounts. These figures are dwarfed by products such as nylon 66 and nylon 6 (polycaprolactam), which are each produced at around 4 million tonnes annually. About 15 000 tonnes of aspirin are produced annually, and the terpenoid vitamins (A, E and K) are produced in comparable quantities
to the ionone family of fragrance ingredients (with which they share a common precursor, citral).
The cost restraints on the industry are, ultimately, imposed by the consumer. In many products, such as soap and laundry powder, the fragrance may contribute significantly to the overall cost of the finished goods. If the price of one product is not acceptable, the consumer selects a competitive brand. The manufacturer of these products therefore puts considerable pressure on the fragrance supplier to develop the most effective fragrance at the lowest possible cost. The highest-volume fragrance ingredients cost only a few pounds per kilogramme. This is not far above the cost of many basic petrochemical building blocks which are, typically, in the £0.5-10/kg price range.
Thus, the fragrance chemist has to work hard and think creatively and opportunistically to provide materials at an acceptable cost, but without the advantages of scale that the bulk-chemicals industry enjoys. One method used to achieve this is to seek out materials that the bulk industries use as intermediates or produce as by-products and employ these as feedstocks for the preparation of perfume ingredients. The application of this approach is apparent in many of the sections of this chapter, in which the ingredients described are mostly based on family trees of materials produced from a common feedstock or group of feedstocks.
Experienced fragrance chemists build economic considerations into their thinking, even at the stage of designing new molecules, since they know that a material will not be successful if it cannot be produced at a competitive cost.
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