Hindustan Unilever (HUL) opened the Unilever Fragrance Hub (UFH) in Mumbai, marking a milestone in Unilever's global innovation journey and reinforcing India as a key growth market and research and development centre. The India facility is the third global hub after the UK and the US and forms part of Unilever's €100 mn programme to advance in?house digitally enabled fragrance creation. The hub at IIT Bombay is designed to accelerate innovation, enhance product experience and support premiumisation across categories.

The Mumbai hub integrates consumer insight, advanced science and artificial intelligence to bring fragrance design, development and evaluation closer to one of the world’s fastest-growing consumer markets. Co?location with IIT Bombay creates opportunities to collaborate with academia in areas of science, technology, data and digital?first fragrance innovation. Unilever regards fragrance as an increasingly important driver of product desirability and brand preference.

Unilever said the India UFH will harness the country’s expanding consumption base to design fragrances that can scale globally and drive growth. Vivek Sirohi, Head of Unilever Fragrance House, said that India is one of Unilever's most important growth markets and that the hub reflects continued investment in capabilities that bring together science, technology and deep consumer insight. He said the facility enables faster local response, deeper market understanding and improved self?reliance in application and evaluation.

Vibhav Sanzgiri, Executive Director, R&D at HUL, said that fragrance elevates the consumer experience and the performance of everyday products from shampoos and body washes to deodorants and laundry detergents. He said the India lab is a fully integrated fragrance creation, application and evaluation facility combining proprietary creation software, real?time evaluation data capture and advanced compounding technologies to enable teams to design, test and refine fragrances end?to?end while collaborating with other Unilever hubs globally.

The new hub underlines the company's continued commitment to India as a priority market and a global centre of excellence. HUL said its products touch nine out of 10 households in the country and that the Mumbai facility will harness local insight to support premiumisation and growth.