I travelled to the traditional center of the industry in the south of France to spend five days visiting six producers of natural fragrance and flavor materials. The 23 people on this tour saw wide range of both traditional and some of the most high-tech systems of production.
The general consensus of the group seemed to be that there is good reason to still consider the Grasse area as the heart and soul of natural fragrance and flavor materials. The long years of knowledge of natural materials and experience in a wide variety of processing methods is a resource that cannot be duplicated anywhere else in the world. This is an important reason why many natural materials that are no longer produced in the Grasse area still travel through these traditional Grasse companies for processing evaluation and quality control before they are used by the worlds flavor and fragrance industry.
