Brian is based in Bury St. Edmunds, and has been with Treatt for nine years. He is the Global Category Manager for chemicals and spice oils. We caught up with him to understand how our technical expertise, product quality, and partnership approach to customer service is driving success.
"I completed a PhD in Chemistry at St Andrew’s University and then moved to Germany for a post-doctorate, before joining Treatt, initially in the R&D department. After two years in R&D, I moved into sales, which is still a large part of my role now.
In the industry, category management usually refers to a procurement role, but at Treatt, category management is more aligned with product management. There are eight separate categories, and I am lead herbs, spice and floral (such as cinnamon, nutmeg, coriander, parsley, dill, and lavender), as well as natural and synthetic chemicals.
My role is very mixed, involving sales, pricing and some sourcing. The sourcing element is strategic as we are not just transactional buyers with our suppliers, we’re working in partnership with them. We work with supply partners who take sustainability seriously, which is hugely important to us at Treatt. We try and buy products at the most competitive prices, but will also interrogate their sustainability credentials. For example, they may be burning wood pellets, having switched from using coal boilers, and have fitted solar panels at their factories - all of which factor into our decision-making process.
On the sales side, I work closely with our largest customers for chemicals, spending a lot of time speaking to their technical teams, understanding how our unique knowledge, experience, and product portfolio can solve their problems and ultimately make their projects a big success. I love the presentations with customers as everyone’s olfactory senses detect different aromas with the chemicals, so it can be quite subjective but entertaining. Creating a flavour is analogous to being a composer: you create the harmonies by picking different notes, some of which the consumer might never have dreamed of. It’s a real skill to create exceptional flavours and the training is very specialised, which I find fascinating.
Part of my role is working with a speciality chemicals manufacturer, Endeavour Speciality Chemicals. Endeavour began working with Treatt in the mid-1990s and we are now their global distributor to the F&F market. The collaborative relationship harnesses the technical prowess of Endeavour with the global reach and distribution acumen of Treatt. Endeavour has an impressive manufacturing facility where they produce the chemicals from base materials, for larger scale Endeavour’s parent company Robinson Brothers will perform the reactions. This relationship is a hugely exciting part of our growth story.
I really enjoy the travelling, connecting with suppliers and customers in different cultures. It’s fascinating to learn about and understand where products are grown and manufactured, and to see the human effect of what you’re working on. We are selling the whole value chain, not just the product so it's important we are committed to understanding it, and seeing it first hand.
I’ve recently been in China to develop our outsourcing partnerships, which was most enjoyable, visiting some growing regions of our spice oils, as well as the crude oil distillers and oil refiners. We rarely find out what the products are used for because the F&F industry is quite cloak-and-dagger! I visit Japan every year, where they are more open about the product uses, which enables me to better understand the whole product chain."
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Meet other members of the Treatt team:
https://www.treatt.com/news/meet-rebekah
https://www.treatt.com/news/meet-joe
https://www.treatt.com/news/meet-rosie