Chinese Flavours and Fragracens history

The flavors and fragrances industry developed from natural spices oils, and aroma chemicals, an inevitable product of their development, have now become an integral and important part of the F&F industry. With the rapid development of analytical chemistry, synthetic chemistry and chemical engineering, the aroma chemicals industry is on the rise.

In 1984, the ratio of aroma chemicals to natural essential oils in the total sales of fragrances and fragrances in the world was equal. By 1987, natural essential oils accounted for 15.7 percent of total sales, while aroma chemicals had risen to 17.9 percent. In 1980, China produced about 6000 tons of natural essential oils and 1000 tons of aroma chemicals. In 1991, China's aroma chemicals accounted for 29.8% of the total production of fragrance and fragrance, while natural essential oils accounted for 23.4%. The proportion of aroma chemicals is higher in Shanghai, Tianjin and other major production bases of China's F&F industry. In 1994, the output of flavors was 46,340 tons and fragrances 37,237 tons. There were 450 F&F enterprises with a total output value of about 8.4 billion yuan. By 2000, the amount of fragrance used in China amounted to 151,000 tons, 93,839 tons, and there were nearly 600 F&F enterprises, with the annual sales of F&F reaching 15 billion yuan. By the end of 2013, the total number of enterprises in the fragrance and fragrance industry in China was about 1000, among which 2/3 were raw material flavors enterprises and 1/3 were F&F enterprises. The annual sales volume of flavor and fragrance reached 54.624 billion yuan.

Although, natural essential oils in F&F still occupy irreplaceable important position, make F&F rich "natural sense" edible essence gives a person more with "sense of security”. But the aroma chemicals has the outstanding function which originates from the nature, is higher than the nature. Be like the trace component such as Damascone, rose oxide, the content in Bulgarian rose oil is extremely minute, it’s impossible to extract them from natural essential oils. But once the mystery of them is solved and the molecular structure of these key components of characteristic aroma is known, there are ways to synthesize and apply it in large quantities. Today, the world's annual production of synthetic Damascone amounts to more than 10 tons, equivalent to hundreds of thousands of tons of rose oil. If Ambrox again, the key trace component in department of natural ambergris, the Physeter macrocephalus that produces natural ambergris nowadays is on the verge of extinction, people already cannot obtain this one extremely precious natural animal perfume, but the annual output of synthetic ambergris already amounted to more than 30 tons, this is to rely on natural resources cannot achieve.

Aroma chemicals include single fragrances, semi-synthetic fragrances and full-synthetic fragrances, the first two of which are based on natural essential oils, while full-synthetic fragrances are based on petroleum chemicals and coal tar chemicals. China has the superior natural conditions for the development of natural fragrance, and also provides a rich material basis for the development of single fragrance and semi-synthetic fragrance.Before liberation, only in Shanghai, such as the coastal city of some foreign companies selling imported fragrance and fragrance based on the import of the deployment of small workshops. By the 1940s, some single spices and semi-synthetic spices were produced in small batches in small workshops.

After the liberation of Shanghai in 1949, China's aroma chemicals industry began to take off when the party and government called for self-reliance in order to solve the shortage of raw materials caused by the withdrawal of foreign businessmen and the imperialist blockade. In 1950, China's total output of F&F was 117.5 tons. After 40 years of construction, especially the two major developments in the 1950s and 1980s, China's aroma chemicals industry experienced a development path from nothing to a big one.

In 1991, China's total output of spices reached 20,054 tons, of which 11,200 tons were aroma chemicals, an increase of nearly 140 times over 1955. Generally speaking, we have all the major synthetic fragrances, but what we lack are some small and colorful varieties and new ones. In this way, China has formed a basically self-supporting and supporting synthetic fragrance industry system. Of course, compared with developed countries, China's F&F industry has few varieties, poor quality, backward technology and so on, the gap is still very big, and there are many new backbone varieties and varieties of color have to be carried out our research and development.

The establishment of Chinese aroma chemicals industry

Before liberation, China did not have a F&F industry, at that time in Shanghai and other coastal cities, although there are a number of flavor factories, such as jianchen (founded in 1929), baili (founded in 1924) and jiefu (founded in 1930), but are based on imported spices and incense base, a little mix and made into flavor sales. Since the outbreak of the war of resistance against Japanese aggression, due to the barrier of foreign import channels, resulting in a shortage of incense raw materials, a small number of enterprises in order to survive, has started making isolates from the domestic natural essential oil production, and then try to produce a small number of aroma chemicals. For example, after fractionating citronella oil, the citronellal distillation section was reduced to prepare citronellol. In Sheng Feng perfumery factory, hydroxyl citronellal was first produced.In jiafu perfume factory, howood oil was fractionated to natural linalool and then to synthesize linalyl acetate. Jianchen fragrance factory wu ruikun, feng xizhang and others also made linalyl acetate, geranyl acetate, terpinyl acetate and other ester products;  

The establishment of China aroma chemicals industry began in the early liberation, due to the foreign flavor the retreat of the company and the embargo of imperialism, creates difficulties to the newborn People's Republic of China, the party and the government promoting recovery and revitalization of the preferential policies of the national economy, to encourage and support the development of industrial production, and formed a thriving new situation. So in Shanghai and other places such as bamboo shoots after a spring rain like a batch of fang flavor factory and fragrance factory.

According to the list of Shanghai F&F industry board of trade in 1951, there were 11 industrial households, 16 handicraft households and 3 commercial households in Shanghai, and more than 30 members. Among them, baili, yifen, youning, zhengli, qihua, dagong and maolin were merged into Shanghai fragrance factory (1956.10).Longdali, tianming, liuming and shengfeng were merged into a joint fragrance factory (1958.5).Weimeigao, zhongfu, lisheng, meisheng, weizhong and jinling were merged into weizhong fragrance factory (1958.5).Yongsheng, zhongfu and xinhua were merged into xinhua fragrance factory (1956. 2). In addition, the original jiafu fragrance factory and comprehensive fragrance factory (founded in 1944) were also restored and developed.In addition to Shanghai area, established in 1952 in shenyang xinsheng fragrance factory;The former tianjin fuhua fragrance factory was merged in 1958 to establish tianjin fragrance factory.Guangzhou in 1956 established baihua fragrant factory;In 1957, fuzhou fragrance factory and zhangzhou fragrance factory were built in fujian province.Guilin fragrance factory was established in guangxi in 1958.In addition, in 1956, three chemical factories in suzhou, sanwu, youli and meisheng were merged into sanwu chemical factory, which also produced synthetic spices.In this way, a group of synthetic perfume industry was formed with Shanghai and some coastal cities as the center.This is the initial establishment and rapid growth of China's synthetic fragrance industry

To 50 s, the Chinese aroma chemicals has reached nearly hundred kinds of varieties, a large number of F&F industry fist products such as diphenyl ether, terpineol, piperonyl aldehyde, benzyl acetate, musk xylene, Sandal, vanillin, etc are put into production, formed in the course of synthetic spices industrial toluene chlorination, turpentine oil, castor oil, sassafras oil, citronella oil system etc series products.In 1953, the Chinese foreign trade department found that the Chinese special product of sorrel oil contained about 70% natural citric aldehydes, which provided rich and unique resources for the synthesis of Chinese series of fragrances such as violetone, methyl and isomethyl violetone, and developed a school of its own in the world fragrance industry.

After entering 60s, tianjin built the first, second two synthetic fragrance factory. At the same time, coumarin, musk ambrette and ketone musk were successively put into production in Shanghai and tianjin, which made the production of musk in China leap to a new level, and then developed into the world's main producer of nitrocellulose products. In 1961, Phenylbromoalcohol method was formally put into production in Shanghai united fragrance factory. In addition, a number of important products including borneol, thymol, pineapple ester etc were put into production, which greatly strengthened the coordination of Chinese fragrance industry and made it more self-sufficient and into the international market.

Although in the late 1950s, due to the influence of the "great leap forward" trend of thought, the crude production and the pursuit of output value led to the overstocking of perfume and fragrance, which led to the decline in the production from 1961 to 1962, after the central government adjusted the index of the plan and rectiled the economic order, the production gradually rose from 1953 to 1964.In Shanghai, the industrial base of perfume and essence in China, the perfume production in 1965 reached 3349.53 tons (including 1661 tons of synthetic perfume), and the export of perfume was 2659.97 tons.But from 1966, China entered the "cultural revolution" period.Due to ideological reasons, the spice industry has naturally become a major disaster area: scientific research has basically stalled, and production is very atrophied.By the fall of the gang of four in 1976, Shanghai produced 3,687.60 tons of spices and exported 1,629.99 tons.Compared with 1965, output increased by only over 300 tons in 11 years, while exports decreased by over 1,000 tons.However, the smashing of the gang of four in October 1976 greatly aroused the enthusiasm of the whole nation for construction.Under the guidance of the correct policy of "economic construction as the center and the four modernizations as the goal" formulated at the third plenary session of the 11th central committee, the Chinese people suffered from the "cultural revolution" and happily ushered in the spring of spice industry.

The take-off of China's synthetic fragrance industry

In 1979 at the first national exhibition of fragrance and the kind of spice industry indicates the new central leadership, become the driving force for China spices industry started to take off again, in addition to light industry, chemical industry, farming, JiaoWei, forest, the Chinese academy of sciences and other departments to participate in the research and development, production of spices, raised a hot wave of the bulk sample spices.

In the 1980s, China launched and implemented the "sixth five-year plan" and "seventh five-year plan", and China's synthetic fragrance industry recovered and developed rapidly. During this period the national provinces, municipalities have been setting up flavors factory, old products continue to expand, new products emerge in endlessly, the 1979 national flavors exhibition spices of the catalog containing 175 species, 1983 survey added about 70 new varieties, a total of 250, according to China association of aromatization, and the number of synthetic spices had reached 1990, 650.Turpentine resources with high content of ethylene pinene were found in simao area of yunnan province in the early 1980s. More than 20 new varieties have been developed through separation, synthesis, utilization and development, among which more than 10 varieties have been put into production, including sandalwood 208, dihydrolauryl alcohol, salivone and capernaldehyde.A number of new synthetic fragrances have gradually developed into new backbone varieties, such as acetylcyclamene, ethyl maltol, methyl violetone, polycyclic musk, macrocyclic musk and so on.New food flavor such as methyl cyclopentenol and pyrazine series, furan series, thiazole series and so on increased 80 varieties.Abroad quite popular biological food spices have also been successfully studied.

During the sixth five-year plan and seventh five-year plan period, the process and equipment of some old perfume products were improved, for example, the new process of coumarin phosphate ester was widely promoted and applied. The high efficiency mesh packing column and gas chromatograph used for product analysis and testing have been widely used in various perfumery factories. Also introduced the Swiss Givaudan company's methyl cypress ketone new process, the United States IFF company's hydroxyl citronella aldehyde complete process and equipment. It has played a good role in promoting and referring to the improvement of the overall level of China's synthetic fragrance industry. Established in 1979, China F&F standardization quality testing center has played an active role in formulating and promoting national standards, stabilizing and improving the quality of synthetic spice products.

From the 1980s, especially to the late 1980s, China's township enterprises rose rapidly and expanded rapidly from the coastal areas to the interior land. Such as zhejiang jiaxing, the chemical plant in Shanghai xinhua perfumery plant started with guaiacol and 1980 annual output value 158000 yuan, in 1999 the plant's annual output value of 22.8434 million yuan, export sales of 17.8736 million yuan, the company 4.1895 million yuan, and like a plethora of township enterprises in kunshan city, jiangsu province in the 80 s, 1990 registered 45 spices enterprises, output value of 90-100 million yuan, a quarter of that of jiangsu province, the region's two hydrogen production of strawberry acid, osmanthus, carnations ether and cyanophyll and other new varieties and small synthetic spices, For Shanghai and even the national fragrance industry supporting, flexible mechanism, fast, good benefits. Township enterprises have become a new force in China's spice industry.

After entering the 1990s, China's market economy gradually became mature, the economic law of survival of the fittest became more and more clear, and the contradiction between the old system and the new economy became more and more prominent. A number of original backbone enterprises are gradually declining, while a number of emerging backbone enterprises, especially a number of joint-stock enterprises and private enterprises, are thriving.

In addition, in the 1990s, China also made a lot of progress in the improvement of synthetic fragrance technology. The process of ozone oxidation was widely used, but the process of sodium chromate oxidation was completely eliminated. The three-step water method for synthesis of camphor (one step less than the four-step isomerism method) and the one-step method for synthesis of borneol (one step less than the oxalic acid esterification method) have been put into operation in production. A similar one-step process for synthesizing terephthalic alcohol is now in production, both new and old. Dihydrolauryl alcohol was widely used in the 1980s in formic acid esterification and saponification (two-step method) on the great improvement, has been successfully used modified ion exchange resin direct hydration (one-step method) and hydrochloric acid addition after hydrolysis of the "one pot" new technology. Some synthetic perfume enterprises use their technology and equipment conditions to start to transfer to pharmaceutical intermediates, pesticides and other directions, such as using sassafras oil to produce synergues, pepper butyl ether, etc., is also a trend worth noting.