Consumer products giant Unilever is to build an £80m fragrance research, innovation, product development and evaluation facility, powered by AI and robots, in Wirral. Tony McDonough reports
Unilever is building an £80m fragrance development facility within the footprint of its existing manufacturing complex in Wirral.
This new facility in Port Sunlight will be powered by AI technology and will focus on fragrance research, innovation, product development and evaluation. Port Sunlight is the location of the original Lever Brothers soap factory opened more than a century ago.
Part of Unilever’s current research and development complex, adjacent to the main factory, has been sold off to housing developer Anwyl. But the company has pledged to invest £300m in new R&D at Port Sunlight and other locations.
Fragrance plays a critical role in everyday products such as shampoos, conditioners, skin moisturisers, body washes and deodorants and in laundry and home cleaning.
This new facility will include a fragrance research and innovation lab, a compounding facility where new fragrances are blended and developed, and evaluation suites where products are tested to assess performance and preference.
It will be digitally enabled end-to-end, including robotics to blend fragrance oils and real time data capture, enabling digital modelling, analytics and the use of AI to drive fragrance development.
Once operational it will enable Unilever to bring fragrance innovation to its home care, personal care, and beauty and wellbeing brands, including Persil, Dove, Rexona (Sure in the UK) and TRESemmé, with greater speed and efficiency.
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Unilever is also investing in talent recruitment, hiring industry-leading perfumers with cross-category expertise from fragrance houses around the world.
Its specialist team will also include fragrance evaluators, who are trained to smell and assess fragrances, and ingredient technologists who will work on Unilever’s long-term technology programme to deliver pioneering fragrance innovations.
Richard Slater, chief R&D Officer at Unilever, said: “The investment includes a new state-of-the-art facility in Port Sunlight which further expands our leading-edge R&D capabilities in the UK.
“Our new fragrance facility and expert perfumers will enable us to bring fragrance insight and innovation to our brands at speed and, working with our partners, to reinvent how fragrances are created for consumer products, leveraging cutting-edge science along with AI and robotics.”
Port Sunlight is already Unilever’s largest innovation site in the UK, where alongside two factories and two R&D labs, it has also opened an Advanced Manufacturing Centre (AMC) and the Materials Innovation Factory (MIF) in collaboration with the University of Liverpool.
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