How biotech steadies beauty’s ingredient supply chain challenges

Biotech is solidifying itself as a relief and a catalyst for innovation as beauty brands face increasing pressure around sustainability and supply-chain resilience. Meanwhile, microbial intelligence is an emerging biotech trend, and industry watchers are viewing it as a bridge connecting discovery to manufacturing. 

Personal care companies are looking for ingredients with differentiated performance that maintain resilient supply chains, reduce reliance on natural resources, and develop more cost-efficient production routes. 

Gwenaël Servant, VP of Business & Strategy at Abolis Biotechnologies, tells Personal Care Insights that microbial biotechnology offers a different way to approach ingredient innovation.

“Rather than being limited to what can be extracted from a particular crop, geography, or season, companies can explore how microbial systems could produce or transform molecules with relevant cosmetic properties.”

Servant notes that strain engineering, fermentation, analytics, and bioprocess development are advancing. This is making it easier for personal care companies to assess the opportunities that biotechnology presents for ingredient innovation. 

“The momentum is being driven by scientific discovery and evidence, but it’s also being driven by the need to turn that science into ingredients and processes that can meet real industrial, performance, and commercial requirements.”

A more reliable modus vivendi

Servant says that biotechnology is often misunderstood to mean the recreation of existing ingredients in the laboratory. In reality, it can open up new production routes, improve consistency, and provide access to molecules that may be difficult to source conventionally.

“There’s also a perception that biotech remains largely experimental,” he adds.

“Increasingly, strain engineering, fermentation, and bioprocess development are being considered alongside industrial requirements from the outset.” This integrated approach is helping promising science move more effectively toward scalable production, he says.

While conventional sources will still remain in many supply chains, biotech is framed as an additional way to strengthen and diversify ingredient supply.Fermentation can provide more consistent production routes for beauty ingredients that are difficult to source conventionally. 

“In some cases, it can also create opportunities for IP protection, particularly where the production process, microbial strain, or bioprocess has been developed in a novel way.”

Servant says biotech can offer personal care brands greater control over how an ingredient is produced. Difficulties in sourcing raw materials and agricultural conditions can make conventional supply chains more vulnerable. However, fermentation-based routes can reduce dependence on seasonal harvests or those that are geographically concentrated. 

“[Fermentation] can also support more consistent production and create reliable routes to molecules that are difficult to source through extraction or chemical synthesis. In some cases, you can even choose the country or region where the ingredient will be produced, which is more difficult when relying on extraction from specific natural sources,” explains Servant.

He adds that the benefits of a supply chain that depends more on biotech than on harvests are stronger when sustainability is considered from the chain’s outset.

“Feedstocks, energy use, downstream processing, and manufacturing requirements all influence the overall performance of a production route, so early attention to these factors can help build a process that is both resilient and commercially viable.”

Servant says that biotechnology can deliver the greatest value in cosmetic development when it is used in an integrated approach that combines scientific innovation with a controlled, adaptable, and sustainable route to ingredient production. 

Precision designing ingredients?

Biotechnology helps broaden the range of options available to ingredient developers, and Servant believes that companies will be able to innovate much more precisely because of that. He says that biotech allows brands to investigate new molecules, alternative production routes, and more precise ways of designing ingredients around a desired function.

As designing ingredients become increasingly controlled, companies will be connecting biological data, experimental results, strain histories, process knowledge, and multi-omics insights.

R&D teams can then use all of this integrated data to build a clearer understanding of complex microbial systems and make better-informed decisions about where to focus development. Microbial intelligence combines biological and processing data to guide beauty ingredient development. 

One emerging biotech trend that the beauty industry should be watching closely is microbial intelligence. Servant says that companies are increasingly using it to understand and navigate complex biological systems.

“Cosmetic innovation increasingly involves more than identifying a single organism, molecule, or biological pathway. Developers need to understand how biological systems behave, how different variables interact, and which interventions are most likely to produce a useful and reproducible outcome,” he explains. 

By combining different aspects of ingredient innovation into an integrated process, microbial intelligence can help R&D teams identify clearer development routes and reduce some of the uncertainty associated with complex biotech projects.

“For the personal care industry, this could support better decisions around ingredient discovery, biotics, product validation, and the development of robust production processes,” Servant concludes.