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- [00:02]
A
Hi, everybody. Tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi, everyone. I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian SO1 Wealth Fund. And today I'm in Switzerland and in really, really good company because I am at Givaudin, the world leader in flavors and tastes and smells and all these fantastic things which surround us. And I'm here with Gilles Henriet, who has been the CEO for 20 years. And warm welcome.
- [00:36]
B
Thank you. And warm welcome to Switzerland and to Givaudan and here in Chemtal.
- [00:40]
A
Wonderful. And it's kind of incredible to be here at your R and D centre, the center of the world's smell and taste. So let's kick off. What is Givaudin in brief? What do they do? What do you do?
- [00:53]
B
I can see it in different ways, you know. Yeah, we make the world taste and smell very good. But actually we rethought about our purpose a little while ago and we wanted to expand beyond just the world of fragrances and flavors. So the way we express what we do and what we are meant to do is to make consumers happier and healthier, which gives us a broader perspective on what we could do for them beyond the taste and smell.
- [01:24]
A
So, Gilles, let's say now, I'm Tom Ford, I come to you, I want to create a new perfume. How do we attack this?
- [01:32]
B
So basically, that's what's called a brief. So you're going to issue a brief. You are the product manager, the marketing director of Tom Ford at Estee Lauder and you're going to issue a brief and you're going to brief us, but alongside other fragrance houses, because it's a competitive brief and you want to get the best out of the creativity of a broad range of perfumers. So that's how you go about it. We might actually define the brief together because we might help you in defining the brief. What type of consumers, how does it position itself with the other perfumes that you have under the Tom Ford area? You might have some ideas. So it's really. We enter a co development process together through the brief and then we have. So we have 200 perfumers around the world. We're not going to have 200 perfumers working on the tomb for brief, but we are going to have the fine fragrance perfume out of New York, out of Paris, out of, you know, maybe some other places and we're going to create some ideals and it's going to be like a funnel with the team of Tom Ford to actually select Eliminate, and they're going to do that with the other fragrance houses. And at some point we're going to find a few leads on which we're going to work together, make some consumer taste and so forth. And then that can take three weeks with a very small client, two, three years. It can take a long time. And the best wins.
- [03:06]
A
How important are the perfumers? Because you are married to one.
- [03:08]
B
Yes.
- [03:10]
A
What, what, what kind of skills do you. Do you need to have?
- [03:15]
B
So obviously, as you know, you know, at the core of. Of Givaudan, we have a perfumery school. So the perfumery school.
- [03:23]
A
And I'm sorry, do you have. You have educated very many of the world's perfumers.
- [03:27]
B
Yeah. And the perfumery school of Giverno is very well known because it has been established almost 80 years ago. It actually trained, created 40% of the, let's say 40% of all perfumes sold in the world were created by perfumers coming from the school of juvenile. So it's a well renowned. So to characterize what needs to be a perfumer, it starts there. So we select them on the basis of. Yeah, characteristics. They smell, obviously. But, you know, this magic about the nose. Everybody has more or less a good nose. I mean, but the difference between.
- [04:07]
A
Well, you say that you have supertasters, right? You have people with.
- [04:10]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's the accuracy. It's like the perfect ear, maybe, and so forth. But even if you have the perfect ear, does it make you a Mozart? I don't know. So it's really about having a lot of passion for it because you need. You're going to do that for the next 40 years. You really need to love it because it's tough. It looks very nice on paper. It's magic. But we discussed about the briefing process. You are in competition as an individual perfumer. You're going to lose a brief nine times out of 10 or eight times out of 10. So you have a lot of deceptions, you have a lot of setbacks and you need to grab all your confidence to go on the next brief and to be continuously creative. So resilience, persistence is extremely important. Then obviously, having, you know, this creativity, this generation of new ideas and so forth is obviously extremely important.
- [05:09]
A
Let's move on to flavors.
- [05:13]
B
Flavors. So it's more or less the same business, but the application is different. So what we described about fine fragrances, but then obviously fragrances, going into home care, into personal care, into hair care, it's the same Process the same briefing, the same skill set, and then you have the same. For flavors, where the application would be, beverage, would be, food, would be sweets. Because most of the time, yes, the food provides a lot of taste, but because of the fact that you have packaged food and so forth, a lot of what we call the volatiles, the top notes, disappear in the process. You need to put some of those top notes, those flavors which are going to create the really fresh strawberry that you expect from a yogurt.
- [06:08]
A
And when you say top notes, the
- [06:10]
B
top notes, it's really the profile when you smell. So you have top notes, middle notes, dry downs. That's in perfumery. Well, in flavors, when you eat something, most of what you experience in the taste, actually the top notes, the volatiles, you don't chew your. Whatever you have to eat for hours. So actually, the impact of flavors is a few seconds, a few minutes. So it's really about the first impact. When you peel an orange, when you smell an orange, it's the top note, all those volatiles which comes to you. Then you have. Yeah. Then you experience sweetness and so forth over time. But the big difference between flavor and fragrance is that in fragrance, you have the top notes. But then when you have a perfume, you're going to wear it maybe for a few hours. So you expect the dry downs, the smells continuing to diffuse over time in flavors, basically, the impact is very short at the beginning.
- [07:12]
A
So you have been here for 20 years. So I would expect the corpa culture to reflect who you are as a person. So if I read it back to you, you know, performance driven, creative, caring, and accessible, aren't those characteristics that we can put on you as well?
- [07:31]
B
Yeah, otherwise it could not have worked for 21 years. That's what I mean.
- [07:36]
A
Because it takes 10 years to change a corporate culture. You've had 20 years. And so I expect this company to really reflect you as a person.
- [07:42]
B
Yeah, but, you know, I'm also a very humble guy, so it's not such a thing. Where I said, I woke up one morning and said, here's going to be the culture. I think there was a magic fit between what Givaudan had in its core DNA and who I was, who I am. And the match was there. So, yes, I define myself as this, the performing guy and the caring guy.
- [08:02]
A
And what do you think the biggest difference between Givaudin and other companies in the same field? What do you think is the main differentiator?
- [08:09]
B
I cannot talk on their behalf because I've never worked for them. I compete with them. But the only thing I can say is that that's how our clients talk about us. The way I just define the culture of Givaudan actually was something that really echoes the way we are being talked about. So I think the humanity side, the caring side is something that maybe defines us. Not that the others are not human, but essentially that's what's come out very strongly.
- [08:44]
A
What are your most important leadership principles?
- [08:48]
B
Well, it goes back a bit to the culture. I think it's really back to the performance and caring. I would say that we have learned to first it's a bit the equity story that we have created committing on very ambitious targets always that has really, in a way, looking backwards always helped me help us that not being shy about setting ambitious targets which look intimidating, but that's the only way you're going to get to them or close to them. And the thing is that what we have managed, we run the company with five year cycle. So it's been four, five, four times five year cycle, which we've done. We have always delivered on everything that we've committed. So this is something that is really ingrained in what we do is really to deliver on what you promise. The second thing is really about being entrepreneurs, I think finding ways to through the innovation. I think that that's extremely important, which is at the core of what we do.