NYSCC Suppliers’ Day 2026: IFF on how biotech is shaping the future of personal care
26 May 2026 | International Flavors & Fragrances
At NYSCC Suppliers’ Day, Sergio Carballo, senior scientist at International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), discussed three pillars for successful biotech integration: scalability, performance, and trust. The conversation explored how early scientific choices shape commercial success. He also looked at balancing molecular ambition with industrial robustness. Finally, the conversation highlighted non-technical factors that can slow adoption, even when sustainability and performance benefits are clear.
This is Sabina Waldeck for Personal care insights at New York Suppliers Day, joined by Sergio Carballo, senior scientist at IFF.
Welcome.
Thank you.
So can you give me a brief overview of what you're presenting at New York Suppliers Day?
Yeah, basically, the presentation was focused on how biotechnology is shaping the future of beauty.
I basically structured the presentation aiming to explain the three pillars that can move a successful innovation in biotechnology, which are basically scalability, performance, and trust.
And with that, not necessarily you need to make sustainable claims to be successful, but basically if you are able to complete these three pillars, you have a good path to a successful product.
Additionally, I, I focus on the two key platforms to deliver this, which are fermentation, fermentation, and enzymatic biomechanics.
Perfect.
And you've highlighted scalability, performance, and trust as key gatekeepers for biotech adoption in your presentation.
And from your experience, which early scientific.
Most strongly determine whether a biotech ingredient will ultimately succeed commercially or fail before it reaches the market.
I would say the key is think about scalability since the beginning of your design.
So biotechnology allowed design led by.
Creating a successful platform.
But if you have a really strong molecule that delivers performance but is not scalable, then you get problems, especially if it's not cost effective or you have issues in downstream.
So basically, since the beginning, what we should do is we need to support molecular design with a good scalability pathway to build a successful molecule in the market.
Yeah.
And in biotech ingredient design, what are the most Common trade-offs scientists must manage between molecular ambition and industrial robustness.
That's basically one of the things, as I mentioned, sometimes we as scientists, we want to create the best performance molecule, and that creates some issues that is when we transfer this to our engineering teams, they say, I cannot make it happen.
So basically, since we at the beginning think about scalability, performance, and actually create a good story.
To tell customers about your sustainability claims, about your performance claims, that facilitates the path to have a successful molecule since the beginning, since the early start.
Obviously we need to have a process that has to be cost effective and the cost and value of your application is important as.
But I think if you since the beginning consider where are you taking this material in the end, you may have success.
So we as scientists normally trade off.
How can I say it, the best molecular design for having something that it can be manufactured properly and can be delivered to the market.
Yeah, and then from a scientific perspective, what non-technical factors most often slow the adoption of biotech ingredients, even when performance and sustainability benefits are clear.
I think that the most important one is gaining trust from your customers, transparency in your claims, having a compelling communication path to explain basically what you can deliver with your platform.
That's important for example for our enzymatic biomaterials.
Sometimes new customers are not that open to adopt new materials.
For example, in fermentation, it's easy because you are creating bioidentical molecules that are easy to adapt in their formulation.
So in our case we need to create the trust in the customers that we can deliver.
Improve performance in this case because we're having we'll talk about multifunctional materials and secondly that we can also be cost effective formulation compatible so they don't have to change a lot of their backgrounds.
So in that case to me that's the most important part to support trust with compelling deliverables.
