Univar Solutions unveils business strategies for global market reach amid value-chain disruptions
07 Feb 2023 | Univar Solutions
Tony Jaillot, global VP of beauty and personal care at Univar Solutions, reveals the strategies behind the company’s growth and expansion into Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He shares that Univar Solutions is increasing its presence as a global beauty company by collaborating with suppliers. Moreover, Univar Solutions is investing in its Solution Centers to capture market trends and translate them into formulation concepts while leveraging artificial intelligence for efficiency. Jaillot also speaks about value-chain challenges while maintaining a positive outlook overall for the year.
Hello, this is Vina Patel, acting editor at Personal Care Insights, speaking with Univar.
Could you introduce yourself, please?
Yes, Sylvia, thank you for the opportunity.
I'm Tony Gla.
Maybe you can hear my lovely French accent.
I'm based in Paris.
I have been in the cosmetic industry for 27 years now.
I've worked for a company like like BSF or Cargill in the past, and I've been with Univar for a little less than 1 year now.
And I'm in charge of beauty and personal care globally.
I'm the global VP of beauty and personal care at Univar.
All right sounds good.
Let's just jump right into the interview.
The first question is, can you elaborate on how Univar Solutions has continued its rapid growth in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa region in recent years?
There was a lot of events in the recent years, challenging years for all of us that have occurred at Univar that propelled our growth, which has been significant in the EEA in the past years.
The first one was the organization of the company into a global, global divisions, let's say, for beauty and.
Personal care and what we call the verticals.
So for instance, you have the same in in food or in pharmaceuticals, and it has helped us to coordinate our efforts to expand with our suppliers, for instance, with Dow chemical or cow chemicals in Europe, which has given us some new markets and new opportunities.
Then we have also invested a lot into our technical centers, what we call our solution centers, which are technically supporting our our go to market.
So helping customers, with our suppliers' solutions to develop new formulation or expand their portfolio of ingredients.
And last but not least, we also made a nice acquisition a few years ago called Earth Oil.
Earth Oil is, is a specialty oils company, specialty oils that we have acquired and that is now in our portfolio.
So if you take all of that.
We have, we have really transformed universe solution in Europe in the past years to be more efficient and even closer to the market.
Sounds great.
Speaking of like efficiency and new innovations, what are some examples from Universe Solution centers that are driving this growth?
So it is known on the on the market that Univar is is a trendsetter and led by Anita Wofford, our global marketing director.
So basically we capture trends from the market, so new consumer routine, new type of efficacy, new type of texture, and we translate that into concepts or formulation concepts, and that we call the SEM campaigns that have been very, very popular in the in the industry.
So it is something we are continuing to do that.
We need, of course, a very qualified formulation expert, technical expert, which we have, and we continue to expand.
For instance, we have a, we have a center in Paris for many years, but we opened a new center in Essen in Germany.
So that's really the investment of Univer into our solution centers.
And besides the the campaign, the concept that we're developing with our suppliers, we are heavily investing into what we call material knowledge program.
So basically it is getting to know the combination of our different ingredients better, whether it's coming from a single supplier or if it's a combination of different suppliers.
We want to collect and generate data which of course is aimed to support, help our customers to be.
Even faster to go to market, we can talk about that later.
And last but not least, there is a new program that, that we're considering, which is or more than considering, we have started.
Which is basically bringing artificial intelligence into formulation.
So first of all for ourselves to be even more efficient, more digitalized on everything we do in our solution center, but eventually to give, to give that access to our customers through a web portal so they can play with our ingredients, create new formulas.
Solve technical challenges supported by AI.
Of course it doesn't mean we don't have humans.
There will always be humans behind, whether they are technical sales or formulators, people to help customers, but that will speed up the process and give more choices to customers.
These are some of the things, the activities that we're doing in our solution centers.
Sounds are very fascinating.
Like, can you elaborate more a bit on how like AI is sort of being used with maybe like an example or a more simpler way?
For instance, you have a customer who has a shampoo and who wants to formulate a fully natural derived shampoo, for instance.
It may, it may be a challenge, and AI helps us to list all the characteristics that you want to achieve, all the characteristics of the starting ingredients, and then, and then with our portfolio, match them with a new set of ingredients.
And, and sometimes you need completely to, to review the the base basically, so the structure of the of the shampoo.
To make it as performing, so it's foaming, it's conditioning, it's washing, of course, as, as a first step and if you do that manually, it can take many, many months because you have to do various essays and, and tests in real life, whereas with AI you can, you can have models that predict the outcome, so it reduced the number of, of prototypes you need to actually make and that's what we're.
We are, we are measuring today to, to, to select the right partner to do that with us and then to put it in practice.
So we'll take some time, maybe a year or two before it's, it's, it's fully utilized, but we believe in the future for us and for the industry.
So we want to be at the forefront.
So that's why we, we, we venture into those new capabilities for universe solutions.
Yeah, thank you for explaining that.
Speaking of, like, Overcoming challenges using AI.
What are some other challenges or some other main challenges in the personal care space now?
And how is the company responding to them?
So, the, the first thing that comes to my mind and, and that's what we have, what we have experienced the past few years is a supply of material.
Of course, we Not just personal care, but many, many industries have been impacted with disruption in the value chain, and, and, and that's where a distribution company like Universe Solutions play its role to its core.
Our role is to source ingredients and make them available.
For customers preferably at all times.
Of course we were challenged doing that and that's a challenge for the industry, but we have been, we have been present and we have, let's say, control the supply chain to the maximum of our ability to serve customers.
So that's one concern.
Second concern is around sustainability.
It's not easy for both the formulation and the packaging, so it's not easy for our customers to know where the ingredients are coming from, so be fully transparent on their, on their formulation, and that's what we do.
So we work very closely with our supplier to have traceability, transparency, and offer that kind of information to our to our customers.
Then of course always I was talking about the shampoo before that needs to foam and clean as much performance, performance in in in the product, performance in the ingredients, performance into active ingredients, and and that's why we are building a new program.
Which hopefully will, will, will be launched this year, which what we call a beauty incubator.
So we are, we are attracting and collaborating with new companies active in that field of active ingredients, whether they are startups or they come from the food area and they want to investigate beauty and personal care.
So that's a completely new.
Let's say endeavor for beauty personal care at Universe Solutions to bring different and more performance to the market.
And last but not least, we have created a couple of years ago a new unit called the Brands Team which is specifically dedicated to indie brands, small brands, startups, or brands, our customers, and they have a way of dealing with that business which makes them very agile.
And because one of the concerns of the brands going to market is speed, speed and agility, and we're a big company, so this team was specially, let's say organized and staffed in order to be able to answer to those kind of go to market, speed to market concerns from the customer, so.
We are not perfect, we're still, we are always improving, we're always finding creative ways to answer to challenges, but that's how we act upon, upon the challenges of the industry.
It all sounds very complex, but thanks for the explanation.
You kind of jumped onto our last question about what we can expect to come to this year.
Is there anything you'd like to add to that?
Or, or maybe you could elaborate a bit more about maybe what the cause of these challenges are for like, for instance, the supply chain issues that you mentioned.
Like for instance, COVID-19 played a big role, like in the disruption.
So, do you think that is, we're still experiencing the aftereffects or is there other reasons why this is still occurring?
So we, we are much better, right?
The, the entire industry has, as, as being able to solve a lot of the problem, the reopening in, in China in terms of logistics in general for the world and not just for beauty and personal care, but offers new perspective.
We have a high inflation, of course this is not a new news, but from what I, what I see on the, what I see on the, on the market, this may be a plateau this year, so which offers new opportunities for, for all of us.
So I'm, I'm, I'm not seeing shortages as severe as what we had in the past.
Of course, in some selected supply chain we may face like scarcity of material or natural ingredients that are, you know, resulting from harvesting that always can happen, but nothing as severe and of course we will continue to play our role of a distribution company, as I mentioned before.
This year we'll continue to see a flow of innovation from our suppliers.
First, that's really our goal to bring that to market.
So we work with our, with our supplier to train our sales force to create new concepts.
I was mentioning formulation concept before, to communicate digitally with the market so the market can attend.
Seminars and training program, we invite customers to our labs also to be trained on the new products that we are launching.
So this is a prime and core activity that we will continue on top of everything I mentioned, which is basically how can we do even more penetration on the market and serving customers and our suppliers.
Formulation AI concepts, our brands team, sustainability, all those topics are things that are going to increase or be completely new in 2023.
Thanks, Tony, for your comments to my questions.
We can end the interview now.
Oh, thank you very much, Vena for the opportunity.
