Applying a hospitality mindset

COSSMA: It has been a few months since you took up your current role at DSM. What are your first impressions? 

Edson Barros: I can see that I have joined a thriving business that has shown remarkable resilience in the face of all the challenges recent global events have thrown at it. In fact, last year the ‘personal care & aroma ingredients (PCA)’ department achieved its best results ever – recording volume-driven, organic sales growth of 21% over the whole year and 34% in the fourth quarter. The strategic focus for the past three years has been on listening to customers and supporting them with great products and innovations, backed up with good services and sustainable practices. And this has clearly paid off, as our latest Net Promoter Score (NPS)1 results show a 70% score.

I have come to PCA as the business embarks on its next three-year strategy cycle, so I am looking forward to building on these successes by introducing some of the customer- and solutions-focused practices that have contributed to the Latin America region’s success.

What are your new strategies and ambitions in the PCA space?

We want to go on selling proven, high-performance, cosmetic ingredients as part of broader customer solutions, encompassing, for example, trends informed concepts, or formulation or regulatory support. This approach works well, so we will be building on it by strengthening our backbone of scientific expertise – in line with our ‘Bright Science’ motto – and applying a ‘hospitality’ mindset to the services we offer. We also plan to develop our presence in new market territories with real potential for growth, so we will be focusing on claim substantiation for our current colour cosmetics and hair care portfolios and trialling some market ready solutions. The overarching goal is to increase our growth by twice the market rate. 

The ‘hospitality’ mindset sounds interesting, what do you mean by this and what might it involve in practical terms?

When it comes to customer service, the personal care industry can learn a lot from the world of hospitality with its constant focus on good communication and anticipating people’s needs so they really feel cared for and have the best possible experience. We already offer a comprehensive suite of expert services, and we know our customers value these, to the point that some see us almost as team members on their projects.

However, what we found in Latin America is that we can always come up with new ways to be more helpful so that our customers feel that we are beside them every step of the way. For example, we have robust technical teams in each region, so wherever our customers are, or whichever 
markets they want to access, there are people on the ground they 
can contact for personalised help with everything from application support to getting the right documentation in place.

There will always be room for responsive, in-person support, but in our busy world, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can also help with more 
standard queries. So, we are developing an AI assisted tool to give customers instant answers to common questions they may have when formulating with our ingredients. This should be ready soon.

Another example of our hospitality mindset in action is our China approved ingredients. Many beauty manufacturers want to operate there but hit a wall when they realise their products are not China compliant. By making our ingredients China ready from the outset, we can save customers the time and expense of needing to reformulate just for this market.

Our new ‘Sun Smart Community’ also illustrates the hospitality approach. Set up by our UV task force experts, this dynamic, interactive online community provides a space for everyone in the sun protection industry to share their learnings and experiences, to encourage new ways of thinking about sun care.

Certainly, innovation will feature strongly in your strategy to build on your backbone of scientific expertise. What innovations can we expect to see?

Historically, we have always been strong on skin care, especially in the anti-ageing space where we are among the top five in vitamins and peptide science. This market is moving away from treatment only to preventing visible signs of skin ageing, so we are currently innovating around a new concept known as ‘Senolytics’. This involves rejuvenating so called ‘zombie’ or senescent cells which start out healthy but change as we age and build up, leading to signs such as wrinkles.

Academic research shows that cleaning up these cells has a regenerative effect, so our scientists have been taking a closer look. Progress so far is promising.

We are continuing to innovate in the field of skin microbiome beauty too, and having built up a strong scientific foundation, we are now at the stage of launching a skin microbiome portfolio. We have also been investigating new potential in Vitamin B12 which we have found to show real promise for relieving symptoms of sensitive and inflamed skin − a consumer need that is on the increase. Based on these findings, we have launched a new grade of this.

In response to the ‘Skinification’ trend in hair care, we have also been looking at how some of our proven skin care actives could enhance our hair care portfolio. Our natural moisturising agent2, for example, could play an important role in targeting dry scalp conditions and we have natural ingredients that could target hair density and the appearance of greying hair.

Another area where we are focusing considerable research and innovation effort is natural UV protection. We are committed to becoming more sustainable in the sun care arena, and consumer demand for products that have as minimal an environmental impact as possible is only going to grow. So, we have now launched a new R&D platform dedicated to natural UV protection and will be working hard to bring natural alternatives to market.

That brings us nicely to the topic of sustainability. What progress have you made at PCA with your sustainability goals? 

Sustainability is all part of the service and we have taken various steps to embed this across our value chains so we can deliver concrete responses to our customers’ requests. For example, we know that sometimes, customers would like the choice of more sustainably produced versions of current ingredients in our portfolios. So, we have just developed a fully bio-based, and therefore renewable, Vitamin A. Our company also recently acquired a flavour and fragrance bio-based intermediates business from Amyris, which will enable us to extend our current aroma ingredients portfolio with more sustainable biotech-based products.

Then, to make sure we are constantly moving in the right direction, we have signed up to various independent audits and are working with external parties on areas like our Life-Cycle Assessments (LCA). This helps us to identify areas for improvement and gives our customers, and end consumers, hard, industry-recognised data to refer to – so they can see we are not just paying lip service when it comes to sustainability.

And of course, at PCA we are working towards the company’s overall net zero targets as well. These have been reviewed and approved by the Science Based Targets Initiative3 and were recently updated to reflect the progress already made.

Sustainability is not just about the planet’s well-being though; it is also about human health. So, in line with this and with global skin cancer rates soaring, we recently partnered with the US Skin Cancer Foundation, joining them on their roadshow, to raise awareness of sun safety and the positives of using sunscreens.

Could you give us your insights on key upcoming trends and how these might impact our industry in the future?

Thanks to digitalisation, the industry has greater and closer access to end consumers, making it quicker and easier to respond to their needs and bring new finished products to the market. To capitalise on this, we are going to see various new business models. For example, in human nutrition, our company recently invested in a company4 in the US that uses digital platforms and apps to test novel innovations and concepts through a direct-to-consumer approach. With this model, you can deliver individualised solutions to consumers − something they increasingly expect. We will be making the capabilities to explore these approaches within PCA as these trends have potential to be real game changers for the personal care industry.

References:

1 The Net Promoter Score (NPS) or promoter overhang is 

a key figure that measures the extent to which consumers 

would recommend a product or service to others.

2 Pentavitin

3 https://sciencebasedtargets.org 

4 Hologram Sciences