In February 2024, Azelis announced the appointment of Steve Pringle to the senior management role of managing director of Vigon International, an Azelis company. For this year's Leaders & Newsmakers issue, Pringle shares key company highlights over the last 12 months, influencers for innovation in F&F and Azelis' main focuses.
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In February 2024, Azelis announced the appointment of Steve Pringle to the senior management role of managing director of Vigon International, an Azelis company. For this year's Leaders & Newsmakers issue, Pringle shares key company highlights over the last 12 months, influencers for innovation in F&F and Azelis' main focuses.
Azelis
2023 Sales: €3.2 billiona
Steve Pringle, managing director, Vigon, an Azelis Company (F&F US)courtesy of Azelis
Can you share three key company highlights for the last 12 months?
Steve Pringle [SP]: The past 12 months have seen an exciting transition in our senior leadership with the appointments of Anna Bertona as Group CEO, Evy Hellinckx as EMEA CEO, and Todd Cottrell as Americas CEO, as well as several other business unit executives. With these changes comes an increased focus on alignment, as well as on building globally connected, digitally enabled businesses. This is even more so for the food & beverage and flavor and fragrance (F&F) markets, for which we have significantly strengthened our footprint in the Americas region with the acquisition of Gillco Ingredients in the US and Vogler in Brazil.
In October last year, we acquired BLH SAS (“BLH”), a well-known distributor of F&F focused on the fine perfumery market in France. This acquisition reinforced and expanded Azelis’ F&F footprint in EMEA by strengthening our ability to serve customers in the region with additional product lines. BLH’s expertise in fine perfumery and the wider fragrance market alongside our other business units including Scansmoke in the Nordics, Quimdis in France and Ashapura Aromas in India, broadens our global footprint within the segment.
In the United States, we expanded our global network of over 70 application labs with a new applications and formulations lab outside of Princeton, New Jersey that will serve our Life Science markets. These developments set Azelis up for future growth in the segment by significantly expanding our current technical offerings along with a new repacking and commercial excellence center. The new lab is co-located with other areas within Azelis which increases knowledge sharing with adjacent Food & Nutrition, Personal Care, and Home Care segments thereby creating synergies across the markets and expanding our ability to meet the evolving needs of our flavor and fragrance and personal care customers.
What are the major influencers for innovation in 2024 leading into 2025?
SP: The shift toward more sustainable products is another growth engine for the industry over the coming years. Sustainability is one of our three growth drivers, together with innovation and digitalization, and a testament to our commitment to sustainability is our participation in ACD’s Responsible Distribution Code, our top industry ranking on ESG by Sustainalytics (among a peer list of 178 international traders and distributors) with a score of 11.9 (lowest risk), or CDP’s climate rating program, where we earned a ‘B’ (Management) score. In addition, Azelis has been included in Euronext’s BELbESG Index, as one of 20 listed that demonstrate the best ESG practices. Our task will be to balance regulation with innovation. As an innovation partner with a strong focus on sustainability, we help our stakeholders advance their sustainability agenda by bringing healthy and responsibly manufactured products to market with a competitive edge.
We expect to see consumers continuing to want to connect to simple, understandable and healthier ingredients. This will continue to drive ingredient innovation and stimulate product development with a wide range of healthier product propositions across a broad range of categories. In other categories we expect indulgence to become a higher priority for consumers. Being able to connect to these trends with flavor and fragrance ingredients that combine function with taste or aroma will be important in the way we connect with our customers.
Pringle explains, "Our purpose is innovation through formulation, for which we will continue to grow and strengthen our network of application labs and technical hubs."courtesy of Azelis
What are your main company focuses and/or goals for the next 12 months?
SP: In 2024 we will continue to focus on executing our business strategy, supported by our growth drivers: Innovation, sustainability, and digitalization. Challenges in the global supply matrix will continue to be seen. Azelis is building a global network in F&F with its foundations keenly geared towards reducing these supply chain complexities, improving visibility and making things as simple as possible for our customers. Our passion for simplicity combined with the expanding Azelis global F&F network puts us in an ideal position to be able to serve the market more effectively than a complex supply network of smaller suppliers and producers could. To support this in the United States we have recently opened a new 130,000 sq. ft. distribution hub. This state-of-the-art facility will offer the latest in logistics capabilities and an improved level of agility and service.
Our purpose is innovation through formulation, for which we will continue to grow and strengthen our network of application labs and technical hubs. We will continue to find ways to deliver innovative solutions for the F&F market, leveraging the technical expertise of our highly talented lab teams and exploring ways to share learnings and innovation across related segments.
Sustainability remains a key agenda item as we continually invest in decarbonizing our operations. At Vigon, we pride ourselves as enabling our customers more sustainable solutions along with faster time to market. Another focus will be in the investment in digitalization, launching customer portals and investing in digital marketing to bring our formulations and technical expertise closer to customers.
In addition, through new principal relationships and acquisitions, we will expand our product portfolio to enhance our lateral value chain in F&F. This will allow us to offer our customers greater value through more innovative and sustainable solutions, working closely with our principals and suppliers to ensure that we continue to operate responsibly and with a high level of accountability.
Footnote
ahttps://www.azelis.com/en/news/azelis-reports-solid-margin-progress-for-9m-2023-0
bEuronext’s BELESG is a registered trademark of Azelis
