Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA): Calculating the Path to GHG Reductions in IFF Products & Supply Chain

Sustainability expectations are rising fast — and so is the bar for proving progress.

Today, it’s not enough for an organization to say it is reducing its environmental impact. Customers, regulators and investors increasingly want to see the data behind the claims. That’s where Life Cycle Assessment comes in.

LCAs are quantitative analyses of environmental impacts across all stages of the product life cycle:

• Cradle-to-gate (from raw material acquisition through manufacturing)
• Cradle-to-grave (including distribution, product use, and end-of-life)
• Cradle-to-cradle (through a product’s reuse or repurposing)

Increasingly, this work is also translated into a product carbon footprint: a clear, standardized measure of the GHG emissions tied to a product across its life cycle. For IFF and our customers, PCFs make sustainability data more accessible and actionable, enabling better decisions, supporting emissions reduction goals, and providing credible, transparent communication to stakeholders.

We’re constantly asking ourselves how IFF’s products can benefit customers, consumers and the planet. And how can we quantify that to show emission avoidance and reductions over time?

Life Cycle Assessment is a tool that enables quantification. That quantification helps avoid greenwashing and supports strategic decision-making to guide innovation and accelerate meaningful progress in sustainability.

How LCA Connects with IFF’s Broader Sustainability Vision

IFF’s in-house team of life cycle assessment experts calculates quantified results across multiple metrics, including global warming potential, energy use, land use, and water consumption. Rather than stopping at a numeric value, IFF digs deeper to uncover what’s actually driving impacts, where the biggest opportunities for efficiencies lie, and how smarter decisions can lead to measurable sustainability improvements: not only for IFF’s own operational footprint and innovation pipeline, but for our customers’ and our shared value chain.

The goals of LCAs are to use data and science to access the best overall set of solutions and avoid burden shifting from one impact category to another. In short, LCAs are catalysts for possibilities, providing the insights and foundations for strong sustainability decision-making.

Inside IFF’s Approach to LCA

While the technical details behind them may not sound exciting, LCAs are essential management tools brimming with data and benefits. They help companies:

• Understand real environmental impact across the value chain
• Generate product carbon footprints (PCFs), which measure greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) associated with a product, and are critical to understanding climate impacts 
• Evaluate Scope 3 emissions
• Adhere to regulations and prepare for new ones
• Confidently report progress toward science-based climate goals

While measuring impact is great, putting what we know into action to Do More Good for people and planet is even better.  We use these insights to shape strategies, guide innovation and accelerate meaningful progress in sustainability. In fact, because LCAs can identify potential trade-offs and risks throughout a product’s life cycle, they also play a pivotal role in driving circular design thinking across IFF’s R&D, commercial and operations teams.

Our LCA program helps us put science (and our curiosity) to good use.

Incorporating the Handprint: LCAs for Use Cases

IFF’s own footprint has a proportionally small impact compared to the scale of positive benefits and avoided environmental burdens we enable in the use phase. This is one way that IFF’s sustainable solutions help meet market demands for sustainability while also helping our customers reach their own GHG reduction and other environmental goals.

Because our products still have impacts after they leave IFF and reach our customers and consumers, we’re always going “beyond the gate” in life cycle assessments to ensure that the best sustainability scenarios are considered and developed. Using our avoided emissions methodology, we annually track and quantify the positive benefits achieved through the use phase and functionality of IFF’s sustainable product solutions. This is known as our “handprint,” and it’s critical. LCAs help uncover opportunities to reduce impact during this phase.

In 2025, we estimate that IFF solutions enabled customers and consumers to avoid approximately 27.2 million metric tons of CO₂e emissions (about 19.2 times more than IFF’s own manufacturing operations).

LIFE CYCLE BENEFITS OF IFF’S PRODUCTS & SERVICES

A Deep Dive into IFF’s LCA Work

At IFF, LCAs don’t just check a box. They enable our team to dig into why the footprint is what it is and identify potential improvement levers. We start by defining the goal, then we gather as much information about the ingredient as we can. From there, we map the life cycle model.

LCA Data: Driving Strategic Decision Making

As we continue to work toward making our products and ingredients more sustainable, LCAs serve as important decision-making tools for both IFF and our customers.

LCAs May Reveal the Unexpected

There are many cases in the life cycle assessment world in which expected sustainability attributes were not the key levers for reducing footprints, underscoring the value of a holistic LCA. In our Scent business, for example, a key focus has been on renewability and biodegradability. While these attributes may be desired, LCAs identified potential trade-offs in some cases, as renewability doesn’t always correlate with a lower environmental footprint. LCAs give factual, honest answers to the big questions, sometimes turning expectations upside down and informing unanticipated decisions.

“What makes our approach to LCA a bit different is that we don’t stop at generating a final number. We dig into why the footprint is what it is — what’s causing it, and where the potential improvement levers are.”

Todd Krieger, Senior Life Cycle Assessment Scientist, Director of Sustainable Solutions

Case Study Snapshot: A Unique Drying Technique

IFF’s Taste business was looking to evaluate an alternative flavor drying technology that was expected to use less energy. IFF Senior LCA Scientist Todd Krieger expanded the scope to encompass the entire formulation, not just the drying process. “The results were interesting,” he noted. “While the alternative drying process did prove more efficient, we discovered along the way that the formula required more water to be removed per kilogram of product. However, the formulation changes also led to more active ingredients in the final product, meaning the new drying technology did lead to less drying and a lower overall product footprint in application.”

Identifying Hotspots

Another key benefit of LCAs is redirecting focus from anticipated hotspots to true hotspots. For instance, transportation is often assumed to be a major driver of product carbon footprint, but many LCAs show that it usually isn’t. A robust LCA helps us focus attention on actual hotspots, like energy use or an upstream raw material. It uses science and data to reveal which changes will have the greatest and most beneficial impact.

Informing Product Carbon Footprints

For GHG reduction goals, particularly Scope 3 emissions, customers need reliable, product-level data to quantify the emissions embedded in the goods they purchase. This requires a clear understanding of all emissions associated with making the products we sell to them, from cradle to the IFF gate.

Our product carbon footprints, generated from robust LCAs, do just that. They provide the standardized, decision-grade data our customers increasingly need for Scope 3 accounting, target-setting and external reporting. For any given IFF product, 50-90% of the burden can come from suppliers.

The IFF LCA team identifies emissions “hotspots,” highlighting which materials and inputs most significantly drive a product’s footprint. This enables more focused supplier engagement, more accurate Scope 3 reporting, and targeted reduction strategies with the greatest potential impact.

By combining supplier data with our own analysis, we develop product carbon footprint reduction glidepaths that support our customers’ climate targets and decarbonization roadmaps. In this way, PCFs move beyond measurement. They become a critical tool for managing Scope 3 emissions, improving transparency and driving tangible progress.

LCA Case Study Snapshot: Decarbonizing Fragrance in the Supply Chain

Much of our life cycle assessment modeling began prior to supplier data availability. Our initial models for a common synthetic fragrance ingredient showed a high carbon footprint as compared to similar ingredients, particularly for its use rate. Curiosity and science came together in an LCA to identify notable emissions from a production step upstream in the supply chain. Research beyond the LCA databases suggested emission reductions from this upstream process were credible but also made it clear that supplier data would be required for validation. The discovery was significant. IFF then pursued data from multiple suppliers, finding some who were already addressing that emission cause or using different, more efficient production routes, resulting in lower footprints for hundreds of IFF fragrances.

The Strategic Role of LCA in the Future of Sustainable Industry

Sustainability is complex. Krieger and the entire LCA team at IFF play an important part in generating sustainability insights. The holistic insights offered by LCAs help build sustainability into IFF’s products, technologies, processes and partnerships. They help inform conscious sourcing, design better formulations, identify where more research and development is needed to address hotspots, improve supplier selection and engagement, and reduce Scope 3 emissions. LCAs aren’t just a bunch of numbers. They are models of possibilities!

A robust LCA program ensures customers have access to important information for decision-making, reporting and advancing their own organizational sustainability. At IFF, LCA’s scientific methodology is part of what makes us innovative partners across the value chain, where we’re driving business value and pursuing creative problem-solving to make sustainability possible for our partners, each other, and the world.

Key Concepts Glossary

• Life Cycle Assessment (LCA): A standardized, ISO 14040/44-aligned methodology used to quantify the environmental impacts of a product, process or system across its entire life cycle, from raw material extraction through production, use, and end-of-life. Sometimes referred to informally as life cycle analysis.
• Product Carbon Footprint (PCF): A measure of the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with a product across its life cycle, from raw materials through end-of-life. PCFs are increasingly being used as a foundational dataset for value chain emissions management because they provide standardized, decision-useful data to support Scope 3 accounting, target-setting, and transparent reporting.
• Scope 3 Emissions: Indirect greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that occur across a company’s value chain, both upstream and downstream. While not directly controlled by the company, these emissions are influenced through sourcing, product design, and customer use. The GHG Protocol defines the standards for measuring and managing Scope 3 emissions.
• Life Cycle Hotspot: A stage, process or input within a product’s life cycle that contributes a disproportionately large share of its overall environmental impact, often representing the greatest opportunity for targeted emissions reduction.
• Cradle-to-gate: A system boundary for quantifying environmental impacts from raw material extraction through manufacturing, ending at the point the product leaves the producer’s facility.
• Cradle-to-grave: A system boundary that includes the full life cycle of a product, from raw material extraction through production, distribution, use, and end-of-life disposal.
• Cradle-to-cradle: A system boundary that considers a circular life cycle, where products are designed for reuse, recycling, or repurposing, minimizing waste and extending material value across multiple life cycles.