What is the difference between a flavour and a fragrance?

They are built by the same discipline, from overlapping palettes, and often by the same person. A flavourist and a perfumer are both composing with volatile aromatic compounds and both thinking in top, middle and base notes.

The difference is the destination, and it is not a matter of degree.

A flavour goes into something that is eaten or drunk. Every raw material in it has to be approved for food use, at the level used, in the market it is sold in. It has to survive whatever the product goes through — heat, acid, shear, months on a shelf — and it has to work with a base that is mostly water, sugar, fat or protein.

A fragrance goes onto skin, into a wash, or into the air. The safety framework is a different one, and the performance question is different too: how it develops over hours, how it behaves on skin, how it survives an alkaline soap base or a high-alcohol system.

Some materials are permitted in both. Many are permitted in only one. A material being safe in a body spray tells you nothing whatsoever about whether it may go in a drink, and this is the single most important thing to understand if you make both kinds of product.

We manufacture both, which is exactly why we keep the question of where it is going at the front of every brief.