In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - HIGHLIGHTS: Gilles Andrier - CEO of Givaudan

Episode Date: February 20, 2026

We've curated a special 10-minute version of the podcast for those in a hurry.   Here you can listen to the full episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/givaudan-ceo-the-art-of-perfumery-creating-iconic/id1614211565?i=1000750254613&l=nbWhat's the secret behind the world's most iconic scents and flavours? Nicolai Tangen travels to Switzerland to speak with Gilles Andrier, CEO of Givaudan, the global leader in fragrances and flavours. They explore the creative process behind developing perfumes for brands like Tom Ford, the impact of Givaudan's legendary perfumery school on the fragrance industry, and the science of making food healthier without sacrificing taste. Gilles shares his leadership philosophy of balancing performance with humanity, and why experimentation matters more than career planning. Tune in for a journey into the world of taste and smell!In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New full episodes every Wednesday, and don't miss our Highlight episodes every Friday. The production team for this episode includes Isabelle Karlsson and PLAN-B's Niklas Figenschau Johansen, Sebastian Langvik-Hansen and Pål Huuse. Background research was conducted by Isabelle Karlsson. Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi everybody, tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday for the long version. Tune in on Wednesdays. Hi everyone, I'm Nikolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Soan Wealth Fund. And today, I'm in Switzerland and in really, really good company. Because I am at Givodin, the world leader in flavors and taste and smells and all these fantastic things which surround us. And I'm here with Gillesvodin. L'Henrié, who has been the CEO for 20 years, and warm welcome. Thank you and warm welcome to Switzerland and to Givodon and here in Kempel.

Wonderful. And it's kind of incredible to be here at your R&D center, the center of the world's smell and taste. So let's kick off. What does Givada in brief? What do they do? What do you do? I can see it in different ways. You know, yeah, we make the world taste and smell very good. But we actually, we really thought about our purpose a little while ago, and we wanted to expand beyond just the world of fragrances and flavors. So the way we express what we do and what we are meant to do is to make consumers happier and healthier,

which gives us a broader perspective on what we could do for them beyond the tastens now. Soji, let's say now, I'm Tom Ford. I come to you. I want to create a new perfume. How do we attack this? So basically that's what's called a brief. So you're going to issue a brief. You are the product manager, the marketing director of Tom Ford, at the sale out of the seller.

And you're going to issue a brief and you're going to brief us but alongside other fragrance houses because it's a competitive brief and you want to get the best out of the creativity of a broad range of perfumer. So that's how you go about it. We might actually define the brief together because I might you know, we might help you in defining the brief, what type of consumers. How does it position itself with the other, you know, perfumes that you have under the Tom Ford area? You might have some ideas. So it's really, we enter a co-development process together through the brief and then

we have, so we have 200 perfumers around the world. We're not going to have 200 perfumers working on the Tomphear brief, but we are going to have the fine fragrance perfumers out of the New York out of Paris, out of maybe some other places. And we're going to create some ideals, and it's going to be like a funnel with the team of Tom Ford to actually select, eliminate, and they're going to do that with the other fragrance houses. And at some point, we're going to find a few leads

on which we're going to work together, make some consumer tests and so forth. And then that can take three weeks with a very small client, to three years. It can take a long time and the best wins. How important are the perfumers? Because you are married to one. Yes. What kind of skills do you need to have? So obviously, as you know, at the core of Giverdon we have a perfumery school.

So the perfumery school... I'm sorry, you have educated very many of the world's perfumers. Yeah, and the perfumery school of Givod is very well. School of Givodon is very well known because it has been established almost 80 years ago. It actually trained, created 40% of the, let's say, 40% of all, perfumes sold in the world were created by perfumers coming from the School of Gisvenor. So it's a well-renowned. So to characterize what it needs to be a perfumer, it starts there.

So we select them on the basis of, yeah, can they smell, obviously? But, you know, this magic about the nose, everybody has more or less a good nose. I mean, but the difference between... Well, you say that. You have supertasters, right? You have people with... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's the accuracy, it's like the perfect ear, maybe, and so forth.

But even if you have the perfect ear, does it make you a Mozart? I don't know. So it's really about having a lot of passion for it, because you need... You're going to do that for the next 40 years. you really need to love it because it's tough. It looks very nice on paper. It's magic. But we discussed about the briefing process.

You are in competition. As an individual perfumer, you're going to lose a brief nine times out of 10 or eight times out of 10. So you have a lot of deceptions. You have a lot of setbacks. And you need to grab all your confidence to go on the next brief and to be continuously creative. So resilience, persistence. extremely important. Then obviously having you know this this this creativity, this you know generation of new ideas and so forth is obviously extremely extremely

important. Let's move on to flavors. Flavors. So it's more or less the same business but the application is different. So what we described about fine fragrances but then obviously fragrances go into home care, into personal care, into hair care. It's the same process, the same briefing, the same skill set. And then you have the same for flavors where the application would be beverage, would be food, would be, you know, sweets. Because most of the time, yes, the food provides a lot of taste,

but because of, you know, the sort of the fact that you have packaged food and so forth, a lot of what we call the volatized, the top notes disappear in the process. You need to put back some of those top notes, those flavors which are going to create the really fresh strawberry that you expect from a year ago. And when you say top notes? The top notes is really the profile.

When you smell, so you have top notes, middle notes, dry down. That's in perfumery. Well, in flavors, when you eat something, most of what you experience in the taste are actually the top notes, the volatiles. You don't choose your whatever you have to eat for hours. So actually, the impact of flavors is a few seconds, a few minutes. So it's really about the first impact.

When you peel an orange, when you smell an orange, it's the top, all those volatiles which comes to you. Then you experience sweetness and so forth over time. But the big difference between flavor and fragrance is that in fragrance, you have the top notes, but then when you have a perfume, you're going to wear it maybe for a few hours. So you expect the dry downs, the smells continuing to diffuse over time. In flavors, it's the, basically the impact is very short at the beginnings.

So you have been here for 20 years. So I would expect the corporaculture to reflect who you are as a person. So if I read it back to, you know, performance-driven, creative, caring and accessible, aren't those characteristics that we can put on you as well? Yeah, otherwise it could not have worked for 21 years. That's what I mean. So there was a match. Because it takes 10 years to change a global culture, you've had 20 years,

and so I expect this company to really reflect you as a person. Yeah, but you know, I'm also a very humble guy. So it's not such a thing where I said, I woke up one morning and said, here's going to be the culture. I think there was a magic fit between what Givodon had in its core DNA and who I was, who I am, and the match was there. So yes, I define myself as this, the performing guy and the caring guy. And what do you think the biggest difference between Givodin and other companies in the same field? What do you think is the main differentiator?

I cannot talk on their behalf because I've never worked for them. I compete with them. But the only thing I can say is that that's how our clients, talk about us. You know, the way I just define the culture of Giverdon actually was something that we really really echoes the way we are being talked about. So I think the humanity side, the caring side is something that maybe defines us, not that the others are not human, but essentially that's what's come out very strongly. What are your most important leadership principles? Well, it goes back a bit, you know, to the culture, I think it's really about back to the performing and caring. I would say that, you know, we have learned to, first, is to, it's a bit the equity story that

we have created, you know, committing on very ambitious targets always. That has really, in a way, looking backwards, always helped me, help us, that not being shy about setting ambitious targets which look intimidating, but that's the only way you're going to get to them or close to them. And the thing is that what we have managed, you know, I've done, we run the company with five-year cycle, so it's been four times five-year cycle which have done. We have always delivered on everything that we've committed. So this is something that is really ingrained in what we do is really to deliver on what you promise.

The second thing is really about being entrepreneur. you know i think finding ways to through the innovation i think that's extremely important which is at the core of what we do