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In 50 years Hedione has become a basic in modern perfumery.
I will now look into its production process.
My investigation takes me near Geneva,
to La Plaine, where several tons of chemical compounds are produced every day for the perfume industry.
There, I meet Jean-Paul Leresche.
He is a chemical engineer and entered Firmenich, the company that created Hedione, in 1968.
He has worked at Firmenich until now.
Mr Leresche knows all there is to know about how the production of Hedione started.
One afternoon with him is more than another afternoon in Switzerland, it is a journey through time.
I was mandated to develop the synthesis of Hedione right after I arrived in the company.
It was a chemical challenge initiated, if I am not mistaken,
by Mr Roudnitska, who had smelt the first Hedione ever made.
He found it astonishing and urged for production to start as soon as possible.
Still, synthesizing Hedione turned out to be more complex than expected.
Of the seven steps in its elaboration,
one was a serious challenge indeed, at least in terms of thermodynamics.
We submitted the problem to Prof Eschenmoser, our scientific advisor at the time,
he said the reaction we needed could probably not be realized.
It is interesting to see how the « big brains » can be wrong sometimes.
Work began in April and after three quite intense months in the laboratory,
we found a catalyst that even allowed us to skip one step.
Large scale production of Hedione is launched at last.
Manufacturing took place at La Jonction in three small reactors,
I was working with Tony Martenet, a production employee, the two of us made a great team.
We would run the reactors virtually day and night to produce tons of Hedione.
Those were wonderful moments,
because it was one of my first operations, one of the first products I developped,
so being able to fill a drum with a substance I synthesized from just a few grams in the laboratory,
that was almost exhilarating, it was such a great pleasure.
In the 1980s, production is moved to La Plaine and increased to reach today’s 1000 tons a year.
Little by little, syntheses have improved and garantee a constantly,
chemically pure product, always favoured by clients.
Perfumers make the quality,
chemical engineers have to adapt, search and find products that reach the perfumers’ standards.
It is the quality of Hedione, its many qualities, and its low production price,
that made it a key compound in the fragrance industry.
To get there, however, a synthesis had to be found.
This synthesis was discovered by a Firmenich researcher, in his Swiss lab, in the early 1960s.
I carry on my investigation at the Firmenich Research and Perfumery headquarters.