Well, good afternoon, everyone. We can start. Great to have so many of you in the room. Nice to see some friendly faces as well. It's about time we all got together. Also welcome to everybody on the online webcast as well. Lots of Croda people in the room as well that you'll see, some friendly faces, new faces there as well. Introductions will follow, and I hope you'll all be able to stay on at the end of today's session to meet members of the team as well. Okay, so let's start then. The agenda. We're gonna talk a lot about Consumer Care and unpacking Consumer Care in the next two hours. You know, really unpacking the sector.
Each business lead will be able to talk to you a bit more about the color of growth in their businesses. You know, we talk about scaling, strengthening, and accelerating growth, and in the case of Fragrances and Flavours, unlocking the strong potential that we see there as well. The objective is to demonstrate the sheer depth and breadth of the opportunities that we've got. It's highlighting the innovation programs and sustainability leadership and how that's creating new revenue streams. It's also about giving you a bit more confidence in the Consumer Care's ability for consistent growth. Of course, it's all about, it really is all about the team, meeting the team. You know, there's a depth to Croda that you'll see, and it's not just about Jez and me. Never is.
It's all about the rest of them. No pressure for everybody. Let's start then. When I stood to present two or three weeks ago at the results session, you know, I said that we've done some of our best strategic work in COVID, in the pandemic. Two acquisitions, record levels of investment, and an agreement to sell the majority of our industrial businesses as well. You know, lot of change in Croda. These actions have helped to shape the strategic plan the board and executive committee have signed off on. If you look at the next five years, we look with a lot of excitement. Today you're going to hear about three of our six strategic priorities. You know, it's all about strengthening Consumer Care. Dave and the team will bring that to life.
We'll talk about scaling biotechnology with Dr. Nick Challoner, and we'll also talk about growing in China. You know, the personal care China market for Croda is growing at 9%, so lots of good opportunities there to scale that more. The strategy is all about moving to faster growth, niche areas, with innovation and sustainability the key enablers. This approach is opening up more and more revenue streams for Croda. Now we're focused on markets that can value our innovation through high margins. We always have been, and we always will be. Markets that are less cyclical as well as being capital and carbon light. We're a leader in sustainability through our strategy to be Climate, Land and People Positive by 2030, and this is helping us win market share and new business.
It's helping us with recruiting better quality people in the organization as well, as people look for more sustainable alternatives that existing suppliers simply can't offer is one of the big things that you'll hear through the afternoon session. At the heart of our strategy is our purpose. It's about Smart science to improve lives. That will help us inform the choices that we have to make as an organization going forward. You know, you saw this slide two or three weeks ago. You know, the agreement that we've reached in December to sell a majority stake in our industrial businesses will significantly increase our focus and investment capability, not just in Consumer Care, but of course in Life Sciences as well.
As well as becoming a more carbon-light business, we will also have more IP, as NPP sales will be close to nearly half our total sales. Not many companies can say that. Furthermore, we will have greater exposure to faster growth markets, supporting faster top-line growth and increased margins. We'll be in an even stronger position to drive consistent superior returns in the future. We have eight growth businesses supported by Industrial Specialties. All eight businesses have excellent growth prospects, and we expect each of them to grow one and a half times GDP as a minimum. You know, 10 years ago, if you were in this room, you'd be investing in one part of the business. It was Arnold's business called Sederma.
You know, now, the sheer breadth of the portfolio, you can of course invest in that, but you can invest in sustainable ingredients from Beauty Care or Home Care. You can invest in Fragrances and Flavors. You can invest in crop. That's before we've talked about healthcare. The breadth of opportunities in Croda we've never seen before. Our job now is to invest in each of them in the right pace to drive that consistency of growth. They all supply critical ingredients at low inclusion levels, which is important. They're often selling in test tube quantities rather than tanker loads. Thousands of products to thousands of customers with a lot of IP is the sort of Croda model. You're going to hear from all the four business heads today. More on that later.
During my time as Chief Executive, you know, the Consumer Care business has developed quite significantly. You know, we've expanded and evolved significantly to become a truly what I'd call a global business. You know, we've executed our build and buy strategy, or even our buy and build strategy, and acquiring new technology platforms along the way. You know, we've got. We're interested in know-how, in knowledge, commercializing that knowledge all the time. Whether it's Nautilus or Enza, you know, these are technology acquisitions from a few years ago. We're starting to commercialize those in revenue streams now. We're very big at buying future R&D in early, incubating them, and commercializing them.
The acquisition of Iberchem as well at the end of 2020 established our Fragrances and Flavors business, where we see lots of opportunities for growth. We also brought home care in the sector last year as well. While it's a small business, there's lots of good opportunities for growth there, which we'll bring to life with you, and offers really good potential for the future as well. A combination of organic and inorganic growth has helped to meaningfully enhance the amount of IP in the business. NPP sales in Consumer Care increasing from 28% when we introduced the metric in 2013 to over 40% at the end of last year. You know, lots of good knowledge in that business. The customer diversity and geographic expansion has also been significant.
We're present in 114 countries with an R&D and manufacturing footprint to support close proximity to customers. Our R&D is in the country for the country, and that's what we like. We get a lot of pick-up of business, particularly in the small and medium-sized customers. Turning to performance then. Personal care saw a strong rebound in sales throughout last year. If you compare it to the pre-pandemic levels, 2019, up 17%. Growth was strongest at the high end, so we see the big rebound in luxury. The actives business has been outperforming since the lockdown's moderated. Beauty Actives sales were up 29% in 2020. NPP increased to 44% of sales, helping to underpin industry-leading margins of 25%.
After a challenging couple of years in the Beauty Care business, you know, it's starting to benefit from this structural change in sustainability ingredients that I've talked to you about before. We'll provide more detail on that. That's driven largely by things like the ECO Plant being commercialized. You know, big investment from Croda in the last three or four years, and that's starting to materialize in growth now. We're investing ahead of these trends and we're capturing now new revenue streams. We're also seeing healthy demand for sun care, hair care, skin care and cosmetics at large in general, with sales 13% higher. We don't see that slowing down.
After strong demand for hygiene products in 2020 as well, Home Care sales grew, sales growth slowed to 8%, as you'd expect after the tough comparatives. Fabric care and eco products are the key drivers of growth there and again, we'll hear more about that. Our F&F business is proving to be everything that we expected it to be. You'll see more of that in May when you come and see the facility and the business model. Integration is on track and the first cross-selling revenue synergies are coming through now. Trading in the first three months of 2022 has been strong, robust, including a great start for Consumer Care. We continue to successfully recover input cost inflation, as you'd expect us to.
Along with everything else, you know, this rampant inflation is not slowing down. In 2021, you saw the big raw material increases, energy and logistics as well. Cost as a percentage of sales are on the left-hand side of this slide, and we'll fully recover the impact of higher input costs, demonstrating the strength of Croda's operating model, one of our unique advantages and something that we'll continue to do. You know, we have pricing power in the business. We use it when we need to. We're in small inclusion levels, but we're often the magic ingredient in people's formulations. Big pricing power. We use it when we need to. We recover increases on a quarterly basis, so we're now into our 5th quarter of successive price increases, and we expect to increase again for quarter two.
You know, raw material prices continue to rise. We expect this inflationary environment to continue, certainly in the first half of this year. Right. Now, enough about me and Jez. This is the real team. Meet the presenters. Some familiar faces there and some new faces. Let me introduce them and then I'll hand over to Dave. Dave Shannon, at 25 years in Croda. A sales, marketing, and research background throughout his career. You'll see this is a consistent theme. Then we've got the four managing directors of the Consumer Care business. We've got Arnaud Fournial. I think you're here. From Paris. We couldn't afford the photographer to go to Paris, by the way. We got his passport picture instead. But Arnaud, you know from Sederma. 30 years in Croda, Arnaud?
Yeah.
30+.
A little bit more.
A little bit more. We've got Susanna Casas. Susanna came from the Uniqema acquisition, 2006. Worked her way to the senior team in Croda. Sales, marketing, research. Richard Butler. Richard's head of-
Hello.
Richard heads up the Fragrances and Flavors business now for the group. Sales, marketing, research as well. It's a common theme there. We've also got Yong Chuan, who's on this slide there, but he couldn't make it today because I think he's damaged his ACL, I think David was saying. He lives in Singapore, but he's our Home Care head. The four of them have got sales, marketing, research for resources and P&L responsibility to drive the business forward. That's their objective. There's a bit of competition between them as well, which is no bad thing. On top of that, we've also got Dr. Nick Challoner. He gets called a lot in Croda, but it's doctor today. He follows in the footsteps of Dr. Layden, Head of Technologies for the group.
He's trying to bring it all together across the group. You'll hear more about scale and biotechnology from Nick. Julia Creasey, senior member of our sustainability team as well, and she'll talk to you about Scope 1, 2, and 3 and the benefits that we're starting to see in product customers as well. On top of that, we've got Jez. Do you know Jez? Jez Maiden. Phil Ruxton, who's Chief Sustainability Officer as well, so he's guiding us with our sustainability leadership. Enough of that. Dave, over to you.
Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm David Shannon, President, Consumer Care. As Steve mentioned, I've been at Croda for 25 years, various commercial roles, consumer care, and also in our Life Sciences business in both Europe and in the U.S. Most recently, running our operations in North America. I'm really excited to be here to tell you more about how we plan to grow our consumer care business over the next 5 years. Before the break, Dr. Nick Challoner, Chief Science Officer, will talk about our innovation program and in particular, our plans to scale biotech. After a short break, the business heads will discuss more on each of the 4 business units that we have in consumer care, and then we'll take the questions at the end.
Over the next 30 minutes or so, I want to explain why we're confident about being able to accelerate sales growth in Consumer Care, already deliver sector-leading Return on Sales, and our strategy will enable us to drive even stronger profit margins going forward. In particular, you're going to hear how we are ramping up innovation, sustainability, and enhancing our customer intimacy to strengthen our leadership position and reinforce our competitive advantage. Our strategy responds to and is driven by the mega trends that we see in the Consumer Care markets. We're shaping consumer care behavior and therefore the demands of our customers. Digital. Digital is having an impact on every aspect of our lives. Consumer markets, it's driving increased demand for ingredient transparency and accelerating new trends that are disrupting the market. Following two years of lockdowns, consumers are much more conscious of their physical and mental wellbeing.
This has increased the focus on the efficacy of products with increased demand for ingredients that are underpinned by science. Consumers also want to live more sustainably, and that's impacting their decisions when it comes to the products that they buy. Generational shifts are accelerating these trends. The number of consumers willing to pay more for purpose-led brands that meet their specific values is increasing. Turning to each of these trends one by one. Firstly, digital living. Most of the world's population now have internet access and use social media daily. This has two main consequences. Firstly, consumers want to know more about the companies that they purchase from and the products themselves, which is driving a greater demand for transparency. Second, digital is increasing the speed at which new trends are adopted.
The Internet and social media enables companies to engage directly with people globally, which is creating new and often independent brands in the consumer care market. This is also lowering barriers to entry for our customers. These independent companies, or indies, as we often call them, have a dream. They have an ambition to be in the market quickly. They need partners who can take that dream, convert it into a product, and bring it to market at speed. Croda can make that dream a reality. Proximity to our customers is now more important than ever. Our ability to facilitate fast innovation, minimize customer time to market is creating significant opportunities. We supply the ingredients with fully formulated on-trend formulations, as well as broader support in areas like regulatory expertise, helping to ensure the all-important element, speed. For our customers, speed is now becoming the new IP.
Let me give you an example. ZHUBEN, which is a local customer in China, wanted to get a new makeup cleanser onto the market quickly, having spotted a trend through some social media analysis. We offered them a market-ready formulation, shortened their development cycle by six months. Five of our ingredients are formulated into that product now, and we've established a great relationship and are now working together on their next product launch, which includes our ECO bio-based surfactants. This shows how our business model helps us win. No customer is too small. They're often too small for our competitors, and that gives us an opportunity to get in early and grow them. We are developing new ways of working with these customers, including dedicated websites, targeted social media campaigns. We're working with influencers and a multi-channel face to the market.
Second trend is using science to build trust. Consumers want to buy products that deliver performance, quality, and safety. The top graph here shows that consumers are willing to pay more for products with proven efficacy. For consumers, understanding the science is an important part of being confident about the safety and efficacy of the product. Our customers need to enhance consumer trust in their brand, so they're looking to Croda for ingredients that enable them to deliver products with proven, substantiated claims. DECIEM is a former independent brand with the strapline, "The Abnormal Beauty Company." It describes itself as a science-first brand, where product concepts begin in a lab, not in a marketing department. DECIEM is a customer for our Matrixyl anti-aging peptide, which is something that they make clear on the product label. A label which is deliberately scientific and plain.
Another example here is a company or a brand called MATTER OF FACT, whose website gives us the scientific background to all the ingredients in this product. We expect sustainability to be the biggest single driver of consumer markets over the next decade and beyond. Consumers want products containing natural and ethically sourced ingredients. The graph on the left-hand side of this slide shows consumer demand split by generation, millennials in purple and baby boomers in green. More than 50% of baby boomers now consider environmental issues when they purchase a product, although they're less concerned about the broader impact of the product on the planet and the people involved in its production, described here as conscious beauty. In contrast, not only are millennials more likely to be motivated by sustainability, but clean and conscious beauty are almost as important as being green.
The younger generation puts the most emphasis on sustainable products, but it's becoming more important really for all generations. On the top right, there's an example of an indie company in the United States that promotes its plant-based botanical ingredients that we supply. Consumer demand for sustainable ingredients is reflected in increased cosmetic and chemical regulation. There are now very few countries in the world without cosmetic legislation. An increasing number of countries also have chemical regulations in place, up by 20% from a year ago. While the barriers to entry for our Consumer Care customers are falling, the barriers to entry for ingredient suppliers such as Croda are increasing because of increased widespread and complex legislation.
As outlined bottom right, in practical terms, our customers are looking for ingredients that are fossil-free and ethically sourced, which help them reduce their Scope 3 carbon emissions and their transition to sustainability more generally. Many of you will know that L'Oréal is a leader in sustainability in beauty and personal care markets. We have a long-established and growing relationship with them due to our alignment on both innovation and sustainability. To help bring that to life, I'll now hand over to Fabien Deswarte, L'Oréal's Raw Materials Sustainable Innovation Manager, who will outline their approach and what they're looking for from suppliers such as Croda.
Hi, my name is Fabien Deswarte, and I'm L'Oréal's Raw Materials Sustainable Innovation Manager. I'm here to tell you a little bit more about our new sustainability strategy and the key parts we expect suppliers such as Croda to play in meeting these very ambitious but absolutely necessary commitments. The science is very clear. If we want to keep our planet habitable for the generations to come, we businesses have to go through a radical transformation of the way we develop and manufacture products. Sorry, aiming to reduce our environmental impact is no longer enough.
We need to do whatever we can at our level to ensure that we respect the so-called planetary boundaries, i.e., the safe operating space for humanity, or put it simply, the thresholds within which humanity can continue to grow, to thrive for the generations to come. To do so, we launched in April 2020 a new sustainability program called L'Oréal for the Future. This new program builds on the success of a previous sustainability strategy called Sharing Beauty With All. With this new strategy, we raised the bar to a completely new level, taking into account not only the impact of our own activities, but also the impact of the activities of our suppliers upstream and our consumers downstream.
As you can see on the slides, on your screen, I believe you can see that some of the key objectives of this, in this strategy are directly or indirectly related to the ingredients we purchase from suppliers such as Croda. First, we would have to take into account the origin and the sourcing of the raw materials. Clearly, we want to move away from using fossil-derived resources, but we also need to make sure that the sourcing of this ingredient is sustainable, taking into account a number of criteria, including labor conditions, economic empowerments for local producers, as well as biodiversity impact, to name but a few. Secondly, we also need to take into account the way these ingredients are produced.
We need to avoid the use of hazardous chemicals and develop new environmentally friendly technologies, processes to manufacture the ingredients of tomorrow, making the most of tremendous advances in areas such as biotech. Last but not least, we also need to take into account the end of life of ingredients while developing new solutions to make sure that they are respectful of the environment. To sum up, sustainability is an absolute must for the beauty sector L'Oréal is operating in, but also for all industrial sectors to ensure that we keep our planets habitable for the generations to come, but also to meet the ever-growing demands from consumers for greener products. At L'Oréal, as mentioned earlier on, we've set ourselves some very ambitious objectives.
Clearly we won't be able to do it on our own. To do so, we will partner with suppliers such as Croda to develop sustainable development programs that are of the scale required to tackle the emergency we are currently facing. Thank you very much.
Okay. Thank you, Fabien. While L'Oréal has been the first mover in the beauty and personal care market, other multinationals are following on quickly, each with their own particular priorities. Often it's the smaller purpose-driven brands that are the leaders here. Our sustainability offer is relevant to all segments of the market, creating exciting opportunities for Croda. To summarize, sustainability and science are driving consumers and our customers. With customers also wanting more intimate relationships with key suppliers to reduce time to market. Having discussed the mega trends, I'd now like to cover the Consumer Care market and our leading position in it. Over the next four slides, I will explain our highly differentiated position in the market, how we've organized our four businesses to give greater focus, which specific niches they target, and the breadth of technologies that they can leverage.
Firstly, our position in the market. The top of this slide shows the forward compound annual growth rates from 2021 to 2025. Within our personal care segment, we focus on skincare and haircare. Skincare is the biggest, fastest-growing and most profitable segment. We are the leading innovator in biologically active ingredients. We also provide a wide range of solutions to the haircare market. This is lower growth overall, but we're focused on high growth and high value areas, such as products for professional hair salons. Across personal care as a whole, the market for ingredients is valued at approximately $23 billion. A proportion of our business are Croda's heritage ingredients, often used as what we call the chassis of the formulation. These make up the backbone of a formulation. They don't often provide any effect or activity.
Our primary focus is very much on our specialty and active ingredients that are critical to the claims our customers want to make. We produce these ingredients in low volumes, and they're formulated into customers' products at low inclusion levels. We're also highly differentiated with high levels of IP protection and therefore command good margins. The home care market is vast, covering air fresheners and dishwasher detergents, as well as fabric and surface cleaning. We target a very small subset of this market into two high-growth technology platforms. One which delivers sustainable cleaning as well as sensory benefits, and the other that delivers sustainable fabric protection. Finally, we are the leading Tier 2 player in the fragrance and flavors or what we call F&F market.
In this high-value, high-growth market, we focus on emerging markets and local customers with an increasing range of natural fragrance options. This slide maps our four Consumer Care business to these markets. Beauty Actives, in green, is the leading innovator in the skin actives market. We go to market here as three separate brands, each targeting slightly different parts of the market. Together, they provide us with full coverage. We have the largest actives portfolio in the industry, from marketing claims all the way through to scientific claims. Each brand has its own dedicated team, providing focus for business development, accountability, agility, entrepreneurship. Historically, Beauty Care has been the opposite of Beauty Actives, a large business, a very diversified product portfolio, where a lot of our heritage ingredients sit. It's also the business where we see most competition.
Building on the success of the model that we have in Beauty Actives, we've created smaller sub-businesses to provide that focus, entrepreneurship, and accountability, and that is really driving faster growth. These are sun care, hair care, and of course, our formulation ingredients. Our sun care and hair care businesses have huge potential, which we're now starting to capture. Our formulation capabilities have been enhanced as we expand our reach through greater localization and by decentralizing our model. We are developing a Formulation Academy to promote the entire Croda range, including fragrances, to help deliver our customers faster solutions. At the end of 2020, we moved Home Care into our Consumer Care sector as the sustainability drivers are very similar, and it's growing very fast.
In November 2020, we acquired Iberchem, bringing F&F ingredients into Croda for the first time to allow us to provide a formulation capability to our customers that includes fragrances. Of course, last year we added Parfex, which has an excellent reputation for fine and natural fragrances. We're building on the success of Beauty Actives model by decentralizing our approach, putting decision-making closer to customers, and responding to local needs quickly. The breadth of our portfolio of specialty and active ingredients is unrivaled in consumer care markets. In all, we have more than 40,000 different product customer combinations, augmented by almost another 40,000 fragrance references. This is a large and complex business with a technology portfolio that's constantly evolving.
Iberchem is our most agile business, creating over 200 new fragrance references every month to ensure its customers have access to the latest trends. All four businesses are constantly developing new ingredients and refining their portfolios to focus on high growth, high margin niches. Each of these businesses target specific high growth niches in the broader markets, as I've just said. While skincare is already a fast growth segment, the anti-aging niche that we target is growing faster still at 9% per year. In Beauty Care, the sun care market's growing at 4.3% a year. In hair care, the professional hair salon niche has grown at 3.7% a year, twice as fast as the hair care segment as a whole. Within the large Home Care market, the fabric care segment has grown at 6% CAGR.
Surface cleaning has grown at 5% a year, driven by consumers' increased focus on hygiene and demand for products with proven efficacy. Fragrance and flavors is a high-value, high-growth market, and our focus areas are growing even more quickly, at 8% in emerging markets, and 10% for natural fragrances. Our Formulation Academy will bind all these businesses together to showcase how our ingredients perform in the formulation. It will also help to educate and train our customers in how to use them. It will highlight Croda's key point of difference as a total solution provider, capable of developing on-trend formulations that help our customers meet their ambitions. It's the technology-driven niches that offer the highest growth rates in consumer care, and Croda is very well-placed to benefit from that. Croda's strategy is all about strengthening our position in these faster growth niches.
We're focused on those markets that offer our innovation through high margins that are less cyclical, as well as capital and carbon light. I want to outline how we will succeed, how we will combine market-leading innovation with our leadership in sustainability, as well as unrivaled customer intimacy and even greater responsiveness to deliver profitable growth. Our ambition is to be the world's most responsive, innovative, and sustainable solution provider in Consumer Care markets. To do this, we will shift our existing focus from being a supplier of ingredients into mass, prestige markets, to becoming a supplier of sustainable solutions into more premium and luxury markets. This will be achieved by developing more performance-led sustainable ingredients with full data transparency and supported by our extensive formulation and application technologies.
Our customer insights, broad portfolio, and formulation expertise will enable us to become the complete provider of sustainable solutions to the premium-end Consumer Care markets. We expect to deliver GBP 1 billion of top-line revenue and return on sales of more than 25% by 2025. To strengthen Consumer Care, we will become even more responsive, leveraging our unrivaled customer intimacy to meet compressed development cycles and achieve a faster time to market. We're ramping up innovation, ramping up R&D investment, and are taking bigger bets with more ambitious projects. In particular, we're scaling biotechnology as we see a shift from traditional chemistry technologies to more biology-led solutions. That is enabling us to meet growing consumer demand for more sustainable and personalized products. Our customers want us to deliver novel, sustainable ingredients that are ethically sourced and produced from lower carbon manufacturing.
That's how we think about sustainability and the opportunity. Finally, we're investing for faster growth in China, where the personal care market is growing at 9% a year. Firstly, let me talk to our responsiveness. At Croda, we have a direct selling model. We do not use resellers. We have dedicated sales teams in 114 countries, which gives us superior levels of insight into our customers' future requirements, and that drives our own innovation priorities. We also have 45 innovation centers globally, co-located with our biggest sales teams and focused principally on customer applications. Overall, we have over 6,000 customers and, as I've mentioned, more than 40,000 customer product combinations. This model is increasingly relevant as the market continues to fragment.
10 years ago, more than 30% of our sales were to the multinational customers, the balance being regional and the independent brands. Over the last decade, we've seen a steady rise in the importance of these smaller companies. While key accounts such as Estée Lauder and L'Oréal have consistently grown in recent years, our sales to the indies and the regional customers have actually grown more quickly. Multinationals now only represent about a quarter of our sales. The key trends that I outlined at the start are driving this fragmentation, and we expect it to continue. Why is that good for us? Croda offers the broadest range of critical ingredients in the market. Our portfolio is a huge differentiator, and it gives us a significant competitive advantage over other established players and new entrants in our markets.
In addition to providing the key ingredients that makes the label claim, we also supply most of the functional ingredients needed for a formulation that give it the right texture, sensory benefit, and ultimate in-use experience. We complement this with broader support in areas like regulatory compliance ensure customers can get their product on the market as quickly as possible. As I said earlier, time to market has become a real driver of customer decision-making, given the fundamental shift in consumer expectations, competition from more agile competitors, and a collapse in product development cycles. We are an innovation partner to our customers, something which is particularly valued by regional companies and indie brands. For example, an indie company in North Asia came to us when they wanted to take their salon hair products to the U.S. market.
Developing products from Asia without having a detailed firsthand knowledge of the U.S. market was difficult due to the different needs and hair types. They approached Croda. They asked us if we could host two of their scientists in our labs for six months to help their product development. They were also able to take advantage of our in-house salon to do all the necessary performance testing. It was a great opportunity as well for the Croda formulation chemists to work closely with the customer and recommend other formulation ingredients from the Croda portfolio to get the performance they were looking for. This has led to over GBP 2 million in new sales as a result.
We're building on this innovation partner role by providing on-trend and fully certified ingredients in ready-made formulations via the Croda equivalent of what we call a one-stop shop, and educating customers through our new formulation academies. This is what our formulation capability looked like previously, with three global formulation centers and labs in a handful of our key territories. To further increase our proximity to customers, we've decentralized our formulation capability to an in-country model. This means we are working much more closely with our customers locally. We now have three expert formulation centers where we have specialist formulation science capabilities. In addition, we have seven one-stop shop formulation labs, where we have formulation expertise, including with fragrances, and are also able to generate claims data, including performance, textures, and sensory effects.
More recently, we've established eight in-country formulation labs, providing quick turnaround of customer products, development projects, as well as offering promotional packs for marketing purposes. In a typical Croda formulation lab, you're likely to see Croda scientists and customers working together, not just on the ingredients we supply, but on the performance of the formulation more generally, and on all aspects of the product launch that enable the customer to get it to market quickly. Our new labs have the latest digital technology, so we can demonstrate our products and train our customers through virtual means. The multinationals enjoy this capability we offer as well, with notable reformulations of recognized consumer brands being done in our labs as well. Now turning to innovation, which drives growth in consumer markets.
There is regular product churn by our customers, who are constantly looking for the next big thing. Both for them and for us, innovation is the key driver of future success. Croda achieves unparalleled levels of customer intimacy, which drives our innovation priorities and results in a continuous pipeline of new ingredient offerings. It's the creation of these new fast growth niches that continues to power Croda's growth. We are stepping up innovation with more resource, more external partners, and a focus on big bet projects, resulting in an increase in the proportion of protected products that we sell. At the end of this section, Dr. Nick Challoner, our Chief Science Officer, will tell you more about our big bet projects, one critical area of innovation, biotechnology, and how we are scaling that.
Innovation will continue to be Croda's most important differentiator, and our Strength to Grow strategy for Consumer Care combines our market-leading innovation with our leadership and sustainability to meet customer and consumer needs. Next, sustainability. The reason we are confident that Croda will win through sustainability is our track record of successful investments in sustainability and recognized leadership position. Over the last decade, we've invested in sustainability, summarized on the left-hand side of this slide. That has accelerated our ability to meet our customers' sustainability needs and is delivering incremental value to Croda. Over the rest of this decade, our investments in sustainability for Consumer Care will focus on four key areas set out on the right-hand side of the slide.
Firstly, increasing the level of bio-based ingredients in response to the FMCG demands to defossilize their ingredients, where we're aiming for more than three-quarters of our raw materials to be bio-based by 2030. Secondly, working to ensure our sourcing activities have a positive impact on the environment and communities in our supply chains, and we have traceability throughout the supply chain. Thirdly, innovating to ensure our product innovations are working harder than our existing product portfolio to meet the future sustainability demands of our customers and consumers. Fourthly, dramatically decarbonizing our manufacturing processes and supply chains through process innovation and partnerships with like-minded suppliers. If we achieve our validated science-based target, we'll be providing every customer with an average of 35% reduction in their Scope 3 carbon emissions associated with purchases from Croda.
All these investments point to a changing product portfolio in the Consumer Care markets, future-proofing existing value, capturing market share, and developing new market niches. In addition to our three global priorities, responsiveness, innovation, and sustainability, I want to talk about the most attractive geographical market for personal care, which is China. We have a specific strategic objective to achieve fast growth in China, where the personal care market is expected to grow faster than any other region. We're well-positioned to serve the growing indie market in China by adopting the successful model that we have in the U.S. We see opportunities in the skincare market, particularly suncare and anti-aging, as opportunities for growth. We are already well established in the Chinese personal care market, principally selling ingredients for the domestic market rather than export. Croda's brand recognition is comparable to the largest ingredient companies.
We also expect to benefit from Iberchem, which is the leading F&F supplier in China behind the Tier 1 companies, with a particular focus on large and local customers. Iberchem's customer base in China is quite different to Croda's, so we see an opportunity to cross-sell fragrances to Croda customers and Croda ingredients to Iberchem customers, and this will be a focus area for our synergies. Consumer Care sales to China increased by 25% in 2021 as we doubled our resources there, particularly in technical and sales roles. We see the biggest opportunity within the skincare market in China, the fastest-growing skincare market in the world. We'll be investing in more in-country production capabilities with a combined botanicals and fragrance facility near Guangzhou that we expect to build in 2023.
Not only does this shorten supply chains, but it sends an important message that we are fully committed in China for China. Having an active portfolio made locally, supported with in-country formulation laboratories, will help us win in the fragmenting market with the rise of the indie brands like we've seen in the U.S. We're developing our digital capabilities to enable us to connect with these brands also like we've done in the U.S., as well as having a dedicated Chinese website and social media presence. How does all this add up? Last year, we increased our guidance for medium-term sales growth from low- to mid-single-digit percentage to mid-single-digit growth for Consumer Care. Looking back over the last 10 years, the average annual sales growth for this sector has been mixed.
For the medium term, we expect growth to accelerate so that we deliver a minimum of 5% annual sales growth driven by a combination of volume and mix with the synergies from the recent F&F acquisitions on top. The additional benefit to sales that we're currently seeing from inflation cost recovery comes on top of this guidance. We're confident of delivering faster and more consistent sales growth. This will come from the growing customer demand for science and sustainability, our more decentralized model, the addition of higher growth home care and F&F businesses, plus the F&F sales synergies and our expansion in China. The leaders of each of these business units will go into a bit more detail in the second half of the presentation.
Although we already deliver sector-leading return on sales at 25% in 2021, compared to an average of around 15% for our peers, our strategy will also drive even stronger profit margins. We expect to improve our return on sales in 2022 and beyond, principally through improved business mix as we drive the growth of the higher value businesses within the highest levels of new and patented and protected products. Improved profitability at our bio-based surfactants plant in North America should provide an additional tailwind. Investment is focused on new growth opportunities such as our fabric care technology, which quadrupled its sales in 2021, and we continue to be very selective about where we allocate capital, whether through organic or inorganic investment. In summary, our Consumer Care business has evolved significantly over the last few years.
Today, it's highly differentiated with market-leading positions in the fast growth areas, and our focus is entirely on fast-growing niches, high margin and high growth. How do we achieve that? Leading in sustainability and innovation, and of course, we're doing both. Also, we've increased our proximity to our customers. Consumer Care is a global business capable of supporting customers big and small anywhere in the world. All of that is generating more consistent sales and stronger profit margins, ensuring a stronger growth profile for the years ahead. I'll now hand over to Nick, and he will talk to us about biotechnology.
Thanks, Dave, and good afternoon, everyone. As you've heard on multiple occasions today, my name's Nick Challoner. I'm Croda's Group Chief Scientific Officer. It's a real pleasure to be here with you today to talk about how our innovation program is fueling growth in Consumer Care. For the next 10 minutes, I'm going to focus on how the scale biotechnology element of our strategy will enable even greater innovation while also transforming our approach to sustainability. What's biotechnology? Well, it can simply be described as using microorganisms such as bacteria, yeast, and fungi as the cellular factories for the creation of our new products.
Used correctly, these microorganisms can be a highly sustainable route for the creation of new and existing molecules that have applications in high growth markets of today and of the future. The use of biotech for the creation of materials is not new, and it actually predates chemical technology. In the ancient world, biotech was used for the creation of wine, beer, food, and thank goodness it was discovered for that purpose. The more recent industrial use of biotech really started to develop through the manufacture of antibiotics. Since then, it's become an increasingly important technology within the pharmaceutical and the aligned life sciences sectors. Use of biotechnology within the chemical sector is a more recent development. Rapid progression of natural candidate organisms and the potential for genetic manipulation through synthetic biology techniques, we've started to see interest in biotech increase.
It's now being used as both an innovation engine and as a way to deal with the sustainability headwinds faced by companies across the world. Croda is in a strong position to exploit the potential for biotech and to harness its power alongside our traditional chemical technologies. The Croda approach, because we like to do things a little differently, is to deploy biotech for market and even customer-specific opportunities in a targeted manner. We do not want the use of biotech for the creation of big volume bio-based building blocks, like many of our peers. Whilst chemistry continues to offer significant opportunities for innovation through ongoing research into new raw materials, processes, and consumer-led performance targets, it's in the area of biotechnology that we are significantly increasing our focus by investing in both biocatalysis and in fermentation.
Biocatalysis is the use of enzymes rather than metal and chemical catalysts to create the product. Fermentation uses live organisms as the factories of the production process. Through this approach, we expect to continue our reputation for innovation-led discovery by being able to create differentiated new products with greater bio-based content compared with petrochemically-derived materials. Critically, the outputs of biotech are completely aligned with the direction of our customers. As such, we expect biotech to significantly enhance our reputation for both innovation and sustainability, and it will therefore become an increasingly strong element of our strengthen and grow approach for Consumer Care. Biotechnology is not new to Croda.
In fact, you know, we were producing lactic acid by fermentation back in the 1970s, and we have a rich history in the use of enzymatic processes and biocatalysis within our protein development program, stretching back more than 40 years. Additionally, you know, we've been using biotech as a way of innovating in Sederma with some of our best products, such as Majestem, our neck firming active, being developed through biotech. Since then, we've continued to invest in biotechnology, where it's helped create new opportunities for innovation aligned with the needs of our customers. As such, in the last 10 years, we've acquired innovative new capabilities through the purchase of IRB, Enza, and Nautilus, and we have invested in organic biotech R&D and scale capabilities at Sederma in Paris and our two U.K. facilities close to Liverpool in England.
This has allowed us to create broad-based expertise and capability across industrial white biotech, green plant biotech, and blue marine biotechnology. During the next five years, we will invest to increase expertise, accelerate new product development, add manufacturing capacity, create new smart partnership frameworks, and support further acquisition opportunities. These enhancements will further enhance our capability and reputation as a biotech innovator, allowing Croda to continue to develop exciting future positions in both existing and new markets in a manner which is aligned with our purpose and supports our ambition of becoming Climate, Land and People Positive by 2030. Our initial activity has led to five biotechnology R&D labs across the Croda group, and within this, more than 50 dedicated biotechnology scientists actively developing new technologies.
We've increased the breadth of our open innovation activity with universities, and just as importantly, we've also developed strategic partnerships with external companies who are leading organizations within their specific field of biotechnology and are therefore superbly positioned to support Croda within our focus R&D areas. Additionally, we have investment plans in place for our two key manufacturing locations. We've identified additional opportunities for biotech expansion and developed external scale relationships to support product commercialization. To ensure we remain focused on key opportunities, we have identified four Consumer Care-led, big bet biotechnology projects. We describe them as big bets, not because of the capital investment required, but because of the revenue potential of these projects. They represent opportunities for innovation and sustainability-led transformation of our business that are completely aligned with customers and consumer expectations.
The sustainable actives platform will allow us to continue to develop our rich heritage in consumer-led performance ingredients in skin and hair care using biotechnology as the innovation vehicle. Our big bet activity in sustainable surfactants will look to create new classes of biosurfactants, which are sustainably derived but also performance driven. These new sustainable surfactants will complement our ECO range, with both offering new and expanded markets for performance-led sustainability positions in customer formulations. Peptides have developed a leading global position as anti-aging ingredients for skin care formulations. Our aim is to maintain this but to create a new class of functional peptides with enhanced sustainability characteristics. The acquisition of Iberchem has created a fantastic creative fragrance business within Consumer Care.
For this reason, we'll be helping them to introduce new bio-based fragrance ingredients to help strengthen the sustainability proposition for our customers, an unmet need for the fragrance sector. The common theme across these big bet projects is that biotechnology will enable ongoing innovation, facilitate product decarbonization, and support the transformation to bio-based ingredients. I previously described how we built a network of five biotech R&D centers and relationships with external partners with specialist knowledge in specific areas that are useful to our R&D programs. Each of these investments and acquisitions brought in expertise and capability. For example, plant cell culture from within IRB and marine organism fermentation from Nautilus. It's their combination as an R&D engine that makes them so useful. Fantastic ideas are generated and candidate materials identified through the R&D centers, either independently or collaboratively with each other.
We then screen for performance using the high throughput techniques at our Canadian research facility, Nautilus. The positive candidates are then developed into marketable products within our customer-facing businesses. It's this ability to rapidly screen for performance across a range of desired functionalities in a high throughput manner, which is one of the competitive advantages of our biotech investment. This in-house capability is critical in keeping our pipeline of developments and niche opportunities healthy. To bring this process to life, I'd like to showcase some of the near to market R&D activity developed within our big bet projects, and this highlights the innovative application of biotechnology against customer needs. To start with, let's talk about dandruff and our research into novel and sustainable actives.
Anti-dandruff is an ongoing problem for many consumers and is now a basic part of the performance requirements across many shampoo and conditioner brands. This performance requirement has been satisfied for many years by the active zinc pyrithione, which is no longer permitted under many regulatory frameworks and is being eliminated from hair care formulations around the world. While new technologies are being introduced, the gap is yet to be fully satisfied in a sustainable manner. Using the high throughput screening methodology previously described, we have identified candidate materials with one now being progressed to late stages of evaluation. This product is a fermentation product from a microorganism collected from Atlantic Ocean seafoam, and its anti-dandruff potential looks pretty strong against reference industry standards. We hope to launch this product through Sederma by 2023.
Moving on to our sustainable surfactant platform with two exciting projects in the areas of glycolipids and acylated amino acids. Biosurfactants produced by microorganisms offer the potential to create high-performance surfactants through the use of biotechnology in a low energy environment using only natural sugars and natural oils. Our glycolipid surfactant platform uses a microorganism found naturally on bumblebees, which we can industrially scale up to produce a range of glycolipids. We're currently undertaking production trials to develop the material, which we will then use to partner with selected customers to allow the development of the market. The acylated amino acid platform is somewhat further away from commercialization, but I want to mention it today to really highlight the power of synthetic biology, which I'm convinced will have a key role to play in the future of our industry.
Acylated amino acids are an existing class of mild sulfate-free surfactant systems. While these products have excellent performance characteristics, they are produced using synthetically derived raw materials through chemical reactions utilizing some pretty high hazard processes and materials. It's therefore desirable to eliminate these unsustainable elements, and this can be achieved using synthetic biology. Synbio uses a library screening approach across known organisms and then looks to modify the genetics of the organism to enable it to complete the reaction we are looking to replicate. This project is in the early stages of development, but it does highlight the potential of this approach for disruption of the chemical sector. In summary, there's a strong rationale for why we're scaling biotechnology. It will support our ongoing focus on niche innovations and deliver sustainable new product opportunities for the future.
I've also explained how we're scaling biotechnology through our focused investments in areas we believe will have maximum impact for Croda and for our customers. I've also demonstrated how and why these investments in biotechnology are important as a catalyst for innovation and for sustainability-led transformation within Consumer Care. Finally, all that remains is for me to thank you for your kind attention. We're now going to be taking a five-minute break for refreshments. Thank you.
Good afternoon. My name is Arnaud Fournial, and I'm the Global Managing Director for Beauty Actives. As Bev has introduced the mega trend, science to build trust and sustainability. This trend are already a reality in the market, and they are a reality for Beauty Actives. Science is, of course, the strong part for us, and it's linked to our anti-age technology, peptide technology. We see under the Matrixyl 3000, this little logo with something which has been given by our peers, which demonstrates we have been elected to be the most impactful raw material since 25 years of the industry. We are very proud of that, and it shows the success of our peptide story. Also, sustainability is more and more a source of innovation for us.
With the biotech, Nick Challoner have spoken about that, but we have Majestem coming from plant cell culture from IRB and other. Naturality is also a trend that we see more and more on the market. Major customer, like L'Oréal, for example, calculate a naturality index. You need to be natural. If you are not, you are not anymore in the formulations. That's really what we do. The sourcing. L'Oréal also have spoken about this Sharing Beauty With All program. In this program, you have the sustainability sourcing, ethics sourcing and local sourcing. That's what we do, and this is an example with the Fruitliquid Kumquat. Our ambition is to cover the whole active market with the broadest portfolio of the market.
We have for a long time, Sederma, who act in the prestige market. We have Crodarom, botanical extracts who act in the mass market. Since one year, we have Alban Muller. Alban Muller is a botanical active, with local sourcing and also eco process to manufacture our product. Sederma, in terms of science, is really the top of the market. It's highly differentiated active with peptide and biotechnology. Alban Muller, and we have Crodarom with botanical extracts, with traceability, and give label claim to our customer. We have a full portfolio, and we want to have the full actives market or a big part. We are leader in innovative technology of the future. The market for actives is $1.9 billion, and we are leading the three major parts of this market.
You see that the total skincare active increase of 5.3% and the three segment where we are increase much more. The peptide, we are the. It is a leading technology for anti-age. Sederma supply around 80% of the new product containing a peptide. We do continuous innovations on peptide. We launched Matrixyl long time ago. Since then, we have launched seven new Matrixyl. Still peptide, still anti-age, but with slightly different applications. The next generation of peptide will be bio-based. Botanical, of course, derive from plant, organically cultivated, sustainability sources, and this is a huge portfolio of different products. It offer, it also offer to us the possibility to tailor-made product for our major customer. 42% of new launch in the personal care containing botanical.
You see the importance of this market. Biotechnology, we are not a newcomer. We supply more than 15 products already on the market. It's been 33% of our portfolio. We have a multiple platform, fermentations, plant cell culture, and it give sustainable benefits. As you already understood, innovation is the motor of our growth. We will continue to invest in the peptide side. In the peptide, with greener technology, it's mean, with a process where less, we use less solvent, to be something much more greener and still on novel applications on biomimetic peptide. In terms of biotech, we have the plant cell culture since long time now, and we work on the third generation of this plant cell culture with epigenetic. Nautilus, who arrive recently in the group, will be a very important source of marine microorganisms to provide us active.
Synthetic biology, Nick have spoken about that, and we work on a new way to manufacture peptide. This means that we can take an algae or a yeast and put the DNA who produce the peptide. When we have done that, we make fermentations, and they produce the peptide. When we have all these products, what we need to worry it is how you are going to delivered into the skin. For that, this is encapsulation. Encapsulation will protect the active inside the customer formulation, but will also deliver the active at the right level into the skin to be more active, and this is very important. We are going to launch soon a product with retinol. Everybody know retinol.
It's a very well-known product, but what is really new is that the encapsulation technology that we have will provide the retinol at the right level of the skin to give the right applications. 80% of our R&D is green. When we have the active, you have seen peptide, biotech, botanical, and we need to demonstrate that it works. We have a screening of that. The screening will give a rough idea of what can be the applications. We have robotics in Sederma, you will see in the movie. We also have analysis of the market, we have customer need. With all that, we can do a positioning of our active, and we can find what will be the application of our active. After, we need to demonstrate that it works.
This is also a strong way to innovate for our product is the mechanism of actions into the skin. We do that in vivo and after the final juges de paix, as we said in French, will be the in vitro, the in vivo test, where we have panelists in Sederma, around 1,000 panelists, that we use to demonstrate, the result. When we have the active, we have demonstrate, we have product on the market, and this is some example of product on the market. We recently launched Silverfree with a peptide and, we delivery 13% reductions in gray hair. A very interesting result. Gray hair, it's a problem. Nobody has that in the room, but other, can have it. Other can have it.
It also shows that Sederma can be active in the hair care market. We think beauty actives, skincare, yes, of course, but in hair care we also have some interest.
We have examples.
Majestem with the plant cell culture coming from edelweiss, with a neck lifting. Venuceane, which is something which comes from a marine microorganism from the Mexican Gulf. It was before Nautilus, but it really shows what Nautilus can provide to us because what Venuceane gives is a very interesting result in terms of antioxidant and sun damage. Cytokalmine, product from the newcomer Alban Muller, for sensitive skin manufactured bioprocess. Phytoessence from Crodarom, Phytoessence Hazel Leaf, for hair care and with a solidarity sourcing. It means that we have a collaboration with the French government on forests, where we can collect and grow some hazel leaves.
We have consistent growth since 2011 and 2021 of 6.7%, but we will accelerate this growth with a high single-digit %. Doing what we know for a long time. It means deep scientific expertise for unparalleled efficacy. Not only, we will increase sustainable ingredients. We are now the botanicals leader with the arrival of Alban Muller, and we will reinforce that. Biotech leader, we will still continue to invest in terms of R&D, new products and on biotech. China expansion, we will come back a little bit on that. On margin, we have a strong NPP, more than 70% of our products. We are, and you have understood that, highly differentiated products. So it gives, as a result, more than the average sector margin. Investment.
We want to expand in China. China will be the first skincare market in the next 5 years or whatever, but will be a very strong market for skincare. It already is. We want to produce in China, but more than produce, we want to capture the trend. We want to be closer to Chinese customer. We want to reinforce our biotech capability within the group with what Nick show you, but also in Sederma, with some investment in plant cell culture and in fermentations, and acquisition of new technology and natural ingredient. I will leave you with some takeaway. We are number one in faster-growing active technology. We are market leading innovations with NPP more than 70%. We do clever science will drive our future expansion.
This is probably the more important thing for us. 80% of our R&D pipeline is green. We have a leading position in Asia, but we want to invest and to reinforce these leading positions. As a result, we will have fast growth and strong margin. I will leave you with a video who will introduce you to Sederma and little bit deeper in Sederma, in the science in Sederma. Also you will have a video from Boots, Mike Bell, who will explain a collaboration that we have with them. It's a little bit more than a collaborations. It's a scientific intimacy that we have since years with quite a lot of customers.
[Foreign language]Sederma est reconnu pour la qualité de ses travaux autour du mécanisme d'action de ses produits et ses études sont réalisées principalement au sein du laboratoire des tests in vitro. Aujourd'hui, je voulais pas vous présenter les 300 techniques que nous maîtrisons au laboratoire, mais plus vous présenter ce nouvel automate dont nous venons de faire l'acquisition et qui nous permet de réaliser nos criblages de molécules. Nous nous attachons à développer continuellement de nouveaux protocoles, innovants afin de déterminer les activités de nos molécules, mais également leur mécanisme d'action, c'est-à-dire comment ils vont agir au niveau de la peau.[/Foreign language]
Le CRISPR-Cas9, c'est une nouvelle technologie qui a gagné un prix Nobel en 2020. Ce programme de recherche s'inscrit dans l'open innovation qui est une stratégie de Croda pour travailler et implémenter au sein du groupe des nouvelles technologies, globales. Il s'agit effectivement des programmes externes de domaines divers et variés, que ce soit l'université dans le cadre public ou plutôt privé, donc les start-up ou autres entreprises, qu'on essaye, d'intégrer au sein du groupe pour valoriser nos actifs.
Nous utilisons des explants de peau et nous avons également développé nos propres modèles de peau reconstruite. Ce modèle est très intéressant car il nous permet de personnaliser les peaux à façon. Selon le type de cellules, leur niveau de sénescence ou de vieillissement ou encore leurs particularités ethniques.
Nous sommes une équipe de 6 personnes qualifiées et nous réalisons environ 4-5 études par an avec environ 30 appareils différents sur des cibles également différentes qui peuvent être les rides, qui peuvent être les taches sur le visage, sur les mains, mais qui peuvent être aussi également l'ovale du visage, les cheveux gris ou les capillaires. Nous réalisons ces études sur des volontaires externes Sederma grâce à une base de données d'environ 700 personnes. Tout ça pour pouvoir fournir à nos clients des méthodes qui prouvent l'efficacité de nos actifs.
Un groupe de travail RSE est né entre Croda Aromas et Sederma en 2015. Il était composé de personnes de la direction technique, du marketing et des affaires réglementaires. Nous avons sensibilisé les équipes à tous les niveaux de notre activité en passant par le sourcing, les process, la conception des produits finis et leur livraison. L'intégration de la RSE nous a permis de formaliser toutes nos bonnes pratiques qui étaient déjà en place et de travailler sur nos impacts en avançant ensemble avec Croda Aromas et Alban Muller aujourd'hui. Chacun est impliqué dans cette démarche à son niveau et en est acteur. En total accord avec les engagements de Croda smart science to improve lives, nous avons structuré notre stratégie Be Actively Committed autour de notre code de conduite. Celui-ci reprend tous nos engagements et s'articule autour de l'ISO 26000. </Foreign language]
Pour améliorer sa stratégie de sourcing éthique, Sederma a aussi souhaité devenir membre en 2020 de l'UEBT. Pour résumer, nous travaillons en totale synergie avec l'ensemble de nos parties prenantes pour assurer la transparence de nos pratiques et limiter nos impacts.
I'm Mike Bell. I'm Head of Science Research for the No7 Beauty Company, which is part of Walgreens Boots Alliance. I've been in the cosmetics industry for more than 20 years. My role is quite broad, so I look after our research partnerships. Well, it's very much a partnership, really, a very collaborative partnership that has been working for many years. I mean, I don't actually see Sederma and the expert scientists at Sederma as just technology developers of high performance active ingredients. It's much more than that, actually. They have huge science expertise themselves and do a fantastic job at translating that science into really compelling stories for us, for example, as customers. There are many things that go along with the commercialization of technology.
You know, regulatory, legal expertise in the claims space, what we can say, and how we can talk about the technology, and Sederma bring all that as well.
Hello, everyone. My name is Susanna Casas, and I'm the VP of Sales for Personal Care and the business lead for the Beauty Care segment. In my presentation today, I will cover how we will be consistently growing the Beauty Care segment and what are we gonna do differently to make a success of this business and hopefully become as sexy as the Beauty Actives one. In summary, we're doing three things. The first one is the creation of two business franchises to give more agility and focus to growing market segments of sun care and hair care. We're gonna be leading and supporting sustainability consumer trends with our formulation ingredients that run across all applications. We're gonna become a full solution provider with the creation of the Formulation Academy.
Just as a reminder, the Beauty Care business is the most sizable Consumer Care business at Croda. With a large product range, basically all ingredients that are found in a personal care formulation, except the actives and the fragrances. After a couple of years of difficulty, in 2021, it reached a turnover of over GBP 400 million with a growth of 13%. What's the new approach we're gonna follow in Beauty Care? Actually, following the success of the Beauty Actives business, we have created two business franchises for the fastest-growing segments of sun care and hair care. Why have we selected these two segments? Well, first of all, because they are fast-growing segments with more profitable sales for Croda. The second one is because they both have an appetite for innovation that Croda can provide.
The third one, they have a big potential in China that, as you have seen, is very important for the Consumer Care strategy. In 2021, the sun care business at Croda grew by over 40%, and the hair care grew by over 20%. Although smaller in size than our formulation ingredient segment, 30% of the Beauty Care business today, the growth prospect of both franchises is bigger. Formulation ingredients underneath all that is the biggest portion of Beauty Care and today represents 70% of total. These are all the ingredients that make it possible to formulate finished products that provide the right rheology and sensory and run across all the segments: skin, hair, solar, and even color cosmetics.
Underneath that, to bring to life all the Beauty Care business and using our historical formulation expertise, we have created the Formulation Academy, a full formulation service to exploit the breadth of our personal care portfolio of actives, effects, formulation ingredients, and the newly acquired F&F business. This will be a means to grow our Beauty Care business that I will illustrate with some examples later on in the presentation. If we move right now to the right of the slide, this new structure will provide the right setup to achieve the strategy of strengthening Beauty Care with increased focus on innovation, agility, and sustainability. Okay, this slide illustrates with a couple of examples on how we are winning in the suncare and hair care markets.
Both of them are growing at least at 1.5 x the market growth, and they are very receptive to innovation and sustainable ingredient solutions. If we go first to the suncare segment, we enable customers to make pack claims like reef safe, help preserve biodiversity, 100% natural mineral filters that fit consumer demands with a big sustainability component. As most of you know, Croda is the number one in sustainable UV mineral filters and can support the now global all-mineral trend that brings huge growth prospects in China and USA, as well as the usage of UV filters in everyday skin products. Moving to the right, we'll talk about an example in hair care. We're also supporting customers to make pack claims like vegan.
Most of you will know that we have seen an increase of over 500% of the number of launches since 2015 with this claim in the pack. Then another example of The Ordinary DECIEM brand that actually Dave presented at the beginning. Actually, they've mentioned they've launched a new hair care product that mentions in the pack that it contains 2% of Croda's conditioning agent that will provide the hair softening activity to the end product. This really mimics what we are already doing in actives business, as Arnaud has mentioned in his presentation.
In hair care, we're also gaining share at large accounts with brands that you will easily recognize, like Pantene or Herbal Essences, that are traditionally using more commodity surfactants that are being replaced by Croda's more sustainable solutions to formulate the sulfate-free shampoos, as an example. Okay, in the previous slide, I was explaining how we're gonna grow with the creation of the two franchises. Now I'll explain how we are winning in the market with our sustainable formulation ingredients. Here, we're talking about surfactants that are present in over 90% of Consumer Care formulations, products that provide efficacy and keep formulations stable. In very simple terms, they allow oil and water to mix together. The market already exists. We just need to continue supporting our customers to meet their ever-toughening regulation and regulatory and sustainability demands.
The first example here on the left is about sulfate-free trend that has provided Croda with a great growth platform, with a very differentiated surfactant that is today considered the industry benchmark. Going back to hair care, we have one new business with major brands that have formulated sulfate-free shampoos. Overall, sales have more than doubled since 2017 and gained position and new accounts in the process. Significant investment is ongoing in this technology, including biotech routes to produce the same molecule. Again, similarities with the actives business. The second example is about ECO. ECO surfactants made from bioethanol also provide a great opportunity for growth to replace existing petrochemical EO derivatives with identical performance. We are gaining new share at customers we didn't serve in the past by meeting demand for more sustainable solutions.
Our sales have multiplied by 6 in 2021 in Beauty Care alone. Also, with this technology, we are getting pricing power and the ability to secure long-term contracts. Moving to the right of the slide, and as some of you will know, the commissioning of our U.S. bio-EO plant has been challenging for Croda. We are very pleased to inform you that the plant has been operating efficiently for more than a year now, and we are very excited about the sales pipeline and anticipate 75% a year top-line growth, and the plant becoming profitable in 2022. Demand for sustainable ingredients continues and will continue to grow, and our commitment is that by 2030, 75% of our raw materials will be bio-based.
This slide illustrates a few examples of our new product launches in 2021, all of them again with a very strong sustainability angle. If we start from the left, and following a partnership with a zinc oxide producer in Turkey, we have launched our Solaveil MicNo, a brand extension of our Solaveil UV filter based on zinc that will allow the final formulation to be transparent while providing the highest UV protection. The two examples in the middle are for hair care applications, both active ingredients with softening and strengthening properties that will allow our customers to make all free-from and sustainability impact claims that consumers are looking for.
Finally, in the end is an example for formulation ingredient that will provide excellent sensory properties, which is a beeswax alternative, replacing an animal derivative that has been widely used in the industry for its unique properties. Okay, we have explained how we're focusing on high-growth market segments and how the sustainability trends are supporting our growth. Now we will explain more about the creation of the Formulation Academy and how it's gonna support the growth of all the ingredients across Consumer Care portfolio that, as we said before, it represents 70% of the business value. I'll take you through the boxes in turn. Croda has accumulated a depth of formulation expertise across all applications. In the past, we focused on creating stable formulations that supported primary claims, for example, skin moisturization.
In the past 5 years, we have worked hard to understand the sensory aspect of cosmetic formulations and how that affects the consumer experience. With this knowledge, we supported customers to solve formulation challenges. We used the formulation data to work on claim substantiation, and overall, we used it as a way to start the conversation about our ingredients. What has changed after the acquisition of our F&F business is that we have enhanced our formulation capability and have a unique positioning by being able to provide the range of over 1,500 market-ready formulations across skin, solar, and hair application areas. This full-service model is very interesting to small indie brands, but also to more consolidated brands, like medium-size, for two different reasons.
If I take first the example of an indie, these are small companies, very agile, marketing and value-driven, often with very limited formulation capabilities. Croda can help them proposing ready fragrance formulations with the right sensory that reflect the company values. We can suggest claims and provide regulatory advice. We will not sell the ready-made formulation to them, but we can provide advice on contract manufacturers. Croda will sell the ingredients to these companies. For better-established brands, like the example on the right is the GLAMGLOW. We're not gonna help them with the full formulation perhaps, but we're gonna help them to diversify the brand offering by expanding their product range and adding new claims for existing ingredients. This brand in particular started just making face masks with very strong marketing story behind. Now they're moving into skincare segment with formulations full of Croda active ingredients.
We sell. In this case, we sell directly to the brand. Two different types of customers that we will serve in a different way, but overall, they will be taking advantage of our formulation capabilities. We are very confident that the actions we are currently taking in Beauty Care will generate more consistent growth than in recent years. 2022 has started very well. Demand is high, and results encouraging. We expect to generate low- to mid-single-digit growth in a consistent way in future years by focusing on higher growth segments of Solar and Hair, continue to extract value from our sustainable ingredients and eco technology, and make full use of our enhanced formulation capabilities. We expect to improve the RoS of our Beauty Care business as well by continue growing the NPP sales that in 2022 already reached more than 30%.
We'll continue refining our formulation ingredients portfolio and improving the profitability of our ECO plant. We have invested in capacity in areas of high demand like hair care and differentiated surfactants, and we expect increases in resources in formulation academies, albeit investment in this sector will be modest. Now a few takeaways I would like to leave you with. We have a refocused and reintegrated business model. We will continue innovating, driving NPP growth. The demands for sustainable ingredients continue to grow in the market, which works to our advantage. Further differentiation to our Beauty Care business through the formulation capabilities as described, and all of this will serve us to improve margins and more consistent growth for Beauty Care.
I hope you are excited as much as I am because I think this business can become like Beauty Actives very soon. Thank you for your attention. Now I'll hand over to David Shannon to introduce the Home Care business. Okay. Let's get the box.
All right, switching gears into our Home Care business then. As we mentioned earlier, Yong Chuan is based out in Singapore. He leads our Home Care business. Unfortunately he's not able to be here today, but he has pre-recorded it and we'll play it in a second. Sustainability is also the key driver in home care markets, and we have two technology platforms that are helping our customers achieve their sustainability targets. Firstly, as Susanna has outlined for Beauty Care, we have seen sales of our ECO surfactants accelerate rapidly in the area of sustainable cleaning as they are 100% bio-based, but the performance is just the same. Secondly, we have a range of technologies that deliver sustainable fabric care and protection, helping to ensure clothes last longer.
We'll now hand over to Yong Chuan to explain how big sustainability trends coupled with Croda's innovation is driving strong growth in this part of the business.
Hello, I'm Yong Chuan Lew, Managing Director of Croda's Global Home Care business based in Singapore. The growth of the Home Care business is accelerating rapidly, driven by sustainability and innovation. We provide ingredients at small inclusion levels that deliver significant performance, sustainability and sensory benefits for our customers, much like Personal Care. There is lots of collaboration, particularly on innovation. Today, I will explain more about Croda's sustainable cleaning and fabric care technologies, both of which are growing rapidly. At the same time, I will show you some of the capabilities we'll be investing here in Singapore. Firstly, I want to talk about Croda's sustainable cleaning technologies, where we are seeing strong demand as consumers focus on hygiene. Surfactants are formulated into 5%-10% or more of all cleaning products, depending on applications. Traditionally, they have been made from fossil-based raw materials, principally natural gas.
Croda's ECO surfactants are made from bioethanol derived from corn and so are certified at 100% bio-based. Importantly, their cleaning performance is exactly the same as the non-sustainable alternatives. Many brands are committing to 100% fossil-free home care products over the next decade. Initial sales of our ECO products to brands that are differentiated by being green, and we are growing sales to these foundational customers. Beyond that, our sales pipeline is expanding rapidly in every region of the world as we help customers of all sizes meet ever-changing customer requirements. It is a great example of how we are taking market share and displacing petrochemical competitors by providing sustainable alternatives. The next generation of home care products will be derived from biotechnology. In this laboratory, we are developing probiotics for cleaning, part of Croda's increased biotechnology investment.
We are a pioneer in this area. With sales in North America, Europe, as well as Asia for cleaning applications, including combating pet odors. I've now come to our manufacturing operations to show you some of the recent investments we are making in fabric care. The garment industry is responsible for 3% of the global carbon emissions. What's more, over half of the clothes we wear end up in landfill. Extending fabric life can therefore deliver significant benefits for the planet. Croda has developed a range of fabric care proteins that replace silicones to protect individual fibers and double the lifetime of clothes. They can be formulated into products alongside our bio-based surfactants, nutraceuticals, and fragrances that provide sensory benefits.
These proteins were critical to Unilever's relaunch of their Comfort fabric conditioners in more than 30 countries, and in all, we have over 80 customers, and we delivered a 5 x increase of sales in 2021. More importantly, we are helping to reduce the environmental impact of this industry through lower carbon emissions, reduced water use, and a significant reduction in clothes disposed in landfill. We are backing these rapidly growing technologies with GBP 30 million of investment in Spain, in the U.K., as well as here in Singapore, and it's a zero carbon expansion, so we'll not be increasing our carbon footprint despite a 3x increase in capacity. More capacity will mean more sales of tens of millions of GBP a year.
With our sustainable cleaning and fabric care technologies helping customers achieve their sustainability targets, growth is accelerating and we expect to deliver double-digit % annual increase in sales between now and 2025. The proportion of New and Protected Products we sell is also expanding, driving margin improvements. These two technologies are a great example of big sustainability trends, coupled with great innovation, delivering strong growth.
Okay, thanks, Yong Chuan. Hope you find that informative. While Home Care is still relatively small, there's lots of opportunity. It's a great business for Croda, and we're expecting strong growth in the years ahead. I'll now ask Julia Creasey, our Sustainability Director, to explain how these two technologies deliver significant carbon benefits to Home Care customers who are increasingly focused on their upstream and downstream carbon footprint.
Thanks, Dave. Afternoon, everybody. At Croda, our focus on sustainable innovation enables us to develop ingredients which offer whole lifecycle benefits to our customers and consumers, both upstream and downstream. Today's case study focuses on the specialty ingredients which we supply for use in fabric conditioner. As Yong Chuan has just described, this includes our eco bio-based surfactant as well as our fabric care protein. If we start by looking upstream of the fabric conditioner, then we can support our customers in reducing their supply chain carbon through quantifying the benefits of switching to our bio-based surfactant alongside our operational decarbonization ambitions. Today, we can deliver an immediate 11% carbon footprint benefit to our customers when they switch to the eco range of bio-based surfactants due to the use of the corn-based feedstock compared to the petrochemical alternative.
Our manufacturing site in Delaware in the U.S. is powered using steam that's generated by burning landfill gas, as well as renewable electricity, which is self-generated from solar as well as sourced from wind. Since 2018, the increase in renewable energy consumption at this site where our ECO plant is located has led to a further 6% reduction in carbon footprint to our customers receiving our ECO product today. Our 2030 science-based target is to reduce our operational emissions by a further 46% from a 2018 baseline, our Scope 1 and 2 emissions. Our Delaware site has a decarbonization roadmap in place already to halve its emissions by the end of the decade.
By the end of 2029, customers will be receiving a further 9% reduction in the carbon footprint of the ECO product. We want to go further than that. If we can move to alternative sources of our bio-based feedstocks, such as sugarcane or even second-generation feedstocks, then we can provide further carbon benefits to our customers. By the end of 2029, moving sugarcane ethanol, as well as achieving full production capacity at our ECO plant and the operational efficiencies that that brings, will enable us to provide our customers with a further 49% reduction in their carbon footprint of the product.
The actions we're taking in our raw material sourcing and in our operations are really supporting our customers in reducing their supply chain carbon and helping them to achieve their own Scope 3 science-based targets, partnering with us as a low carbon supplier. We can think beyond upstream then and think about the downstream benefits of including Croda ingredients in a fabric care formulation. Yong Chuan Lew has just described the inclusion of our fabric care protein into a fabric conditioner helps to avoid fabric damage when washing. We can demonstrate through our lab testing that clothes can be washed twice as many times when our additive is included in a fabric conditioner formulation before the same level of color fade or fabric damage is observed.
One kilogram of our fabric care ingredient can protect 195 kilograms of clothes throughout their lifetime, which is assumed to be on average about 72 washes when we include our fabric care ingredient in every wash. Consumer studies have shown that on average, about 10% of clothing is no longer worn due to washing damage or color fade, either not worn or thrown away. We can assume that one kilogram of our ingredient is therefore avoiding the emissions associated with the manufacture of 19.5 kilograms of this replacement clothing. One kilogram of our ingredient will avoid 450 kilograms of carbon dioxide and 130,000 liters of water associated with manufacturing this replacement clothing when we assume an average mix of both synthetic and cotton materials.
In summary, Croda Specialty Ingredients can provide quantifiable supply chain benefits, both upstream and downstream to our customers, as well as consumers. Through constant innovation, we're going to continue to identify, quantify, and improve upon these carbon benefits, which will make us the supplier of choice as our customers and consumers transition to a low carbon economy. Thanks. I'll now hand back over to Dave to summarize.
Thank you, Julia. There we go. To summarize, in Home Care, we have two technology platforms which deliver improved efficacy and sustainability. They're driving significant innovation in home care markets. We're investing to meet the growing demand and are targeting 10% or more sales growth per annum with improving return on sales. I'll now hand over to Richard Butler, who will outline the exciting standalone growth trajectory of our F&F business and how we are driving additional sales synergies.
Well, good afternoon, everybody. Last but not least. Yes, my name is Richard Butler, and I'm the Vice President of Croda's Fragrances and Flavours business. You may remember this consists of two brands. It's Iberchem, a large Tier 2 F&F company, which was acquired back in 2020, as Dave mentioned earlier, with a strong presence in emerging and fast-growing markets. We have Parfex, a French Grasse-based fragrance company acquired in the middle of last year. Before we talk about the business, though, I'd just like to take a little step back and talk about the external environment, specifically the competitive environment, because this is changing and it's giving us opportunities. Traditionally, companies supplying the F&F market have been separated into three segments.
The other Tier 1 companies, the big four that you all know very well, IFF, Symrise, Givaudan, Firmenich. Collectively, these have around 75% of the market share. These guys are global in nature, significant scale and resources, usually with in-house raw material integration, and typically have turnovers in excess of GBP 1 billion per annum. These companies are tied into the large consumer multinationals through preferred supplier list, what's called core list participation. These customers are their focus. They are reliant on their presence in large multinational brands. The Tier 2 companies, as represented here, these are the mid-sized companies generating sales between GBP 50 million and GBP 500 million per annum, making up around about 15% market share. The upper end of these are multi-regional, just like Iberchem. The smaller ones just operating locally.
These focus on strong customer intimacy in the small, medium-sized, locally focused customer, the SMEs, as we call them. We also focus on the indie segments, which we mentioned earlier on in the presentations. They aim to be responsive for a personalized service to respond to the customer's individual needs. They offer a balance of service and attentiveness, creativity, but still big enough to be secure business partners for their customers. I should just say as well, this Tier 2 attitude is ingrained in the existing Croda mentality. Just like Iberchem, the majority of Croda's customer base is in this SME indie segment of the market, as Dave mentioned earlier, and so did Susanna. We have the Tier 3 companies. Now it's more than 200 local small companies supplying local niche markets in their local proximities.
The Tier 2 white space is growing because the ongoing M&A activity of the Tier 1 players. When these Tier 2 companies are acquired, they change. They take on the attitude, the processes of the new owner. We'll also, of course, be looking at cost synergies, and those cost synergies impact on the acquired organization. The typical local or regional SME customer no longer feels the same, no longer feel important, no longer has the personalized approach they valued. This is the opportunity for us. Our geographic coverage, local teams, our focus on responsiveness, creativity, makes us the natural destination for these disaffected customers. The Tier 2 white space is growing, and that benefits us. That would be the case even outside of Croda ownership.
When combining the Iberchem model of customer intimacy, agility, quality, responsiveness, and a product offer at all price points with the resources accessible through Croda, the value proposition to customers of all types becomes more compelling. We have an attitude which values the fast-growing, ambitious SME type customer. Plus, we now have the scale and access to technology of Croda. Croda also has existing long-term relationships with the MNCs and the major regional customers, which Iberchem can now benefit from. As we grow, we are in effect becoming a Tier 1.5 company. We're global in reach, global in scale, we have access to new technology and processes. We have the possibility to develop in-house raw materials, as Nick mentioned earlier. With an ongoing focus on the small, medium-sized, local or regional customers and meeting their needs.
Historically, a typical Iberchem customer would be as portrayed on the left-hand side. A family-owned company supplying to their local market. This specific example is a fine fragrance customer in the UAE. A typical Tier 1 customer is best described as anything you would see as you walk through duty-free in international airport. In fact, Croda's beauty actives and beauty care business, Susanna and Elena, have a strong existing position in exactly those brands as well. We now have the opportunity to leverage their presence and relationships to build fragrance sales. In the future, we want to be able to say that both are typical customers of Croda's F&F business. Personally, I don't see us competing head to head with the Tier 1 companies for a core list position. Our offer can certainly be of value to the MNCs.
An example already seen is where MNCs are looking for improved service, manufacturing sites where we have local production. We'll talk more about this in a few slides time. One of the reasons for our excitement is we see great potential for our model with the way the external environment is evolving. Market as a whole is forecast to deliver between 5%-6% CAGR. This differs significantly from region to region, as you can see here. Today, our F&F business has strong presence in the fast-growing markets, as the pie chart shows. When we look at this though, we should not forget the importance of Croda's strong presence, sorry, in the slower growing but very large Western European and North American markets. Using Croda leverage to gain share in these markets is a core part of our plan.
The business plan is underpinned by three growth drivers. First, we have the standalone organic growth. We're confident that the historical growth rates delivered by this business will continue into the future. Second, we have the sales synergies. The added value that we get by combining the customer bases and sales networks of the two companies. We'll talk more in a couple of slides. Third, we have the Parfex growth plan. Capitalizing on the power of a French Grass-based brand, capitalizing on developing expertise in natural fragrances. That's something of real value in a typical Croda customer base, especially in the premium segments in the North American and Western European markets. Of course, we also remain open to targeted acquisitions where we can enhance our business position.
Looking first at the standalone growth, the business model which you see here delivers the results that we've had. The product portfolio is increasing all the time, and we can offer a range to suit the applications and price points according to the local market needs. We are global. Present in 120 countries with 13 manufacturing locations. We're producing in all regions except the U.S. As David said, pace is often the difference between winning or losing. The Iberchem model is set up for pace. In terms of R&D, the Iberchem model today is bigger on development than research. Using existing materials to innovate and creating over 200 new fragrance references every month. Croda is now adding to these fragrances into our research activity, seeking new raw materials or new, more sustainable processes to make them.
This is the model. At an individual customer level, the real differentiator is the attitude of customer focus, responsiveness, agility, a can-do attitude combined with creativity. The end result is that each customer feels important. This intimacy of personal relationship is something which is impossible for the Tier 1 companies to replicate. Secondly, let's look at the sales synergy plan. Targeting EUR 48 million of additional sales in 2025, and these are progressing as planned. Synergies are underpinned by Croda and Iberchem having largely different but complementary customer bases, as we can see in the pie chart. This gives us the opportunity of gaining a share of fragrance business at Croda customers. All of these 6,000 customers buy fragrance. We gain a share of ingredient business at Iberchem customers.
In fact, about 30% of the 3,000 customers here also buy ingredients that Croda could supply. We have the business gains from the full formulation proposals with customers of both companies. It's also worth mentioning that Iberchem are gaining share at their existing customers because of Croda ownership. Their customers now feel confident about putting a greater percentage of their spend with Iberchem because the long-term security and investment in them as a supplier that Croda's made, the access to new technology through Croda, this full formulation support capability that we've spoken about, and the fact there is now no risk of the acquisition by another fragrance company. What exactly is the value that we bring to our customers? Well, the reality is the proposition is different for different customer groups. The key, though, is that we're really set up to offer something for everyone.
We're not a Tier 1 company. We would not want to be seen to have the attitude of some of the Tier 1 companies. With access to the Croda resources, we now have the power and the strength of a Tier 1. This means that the multinationals, the MNCs, and larger regional majors regard us differently now, especially because the Croda brand already has very strong presence in these exact customers. One example of this is the case study just at the bottom of the slide here. A large Spanish brand owner and contract manufacturer, own-label largely, Iberchem has gained half a million GBP worth of new business because of the long-standing relationship with Croda at this customer. This added confidence is also the foundation of new business development at two of the Croda MNCs, and we're seeing this interest increasing.
The fact that we retain the energy, agility, and customer intimacy of a Tier 2 means that we appeal to the SME customer base who want to feel valued as well as the indies. Because they are valued, they're a core part of our DNA. To these, though, to access the Croda ingredients and support, we can offer more value than was possible for Iberchem before in isolation. We are now very different from the other Tier 2 competition. As well as this, though, we now have the total solution provider that Dave's already spoken about, so has Susanna, this capability for the full formulation for those who want it. We can provide the complete fragrance formulation, be it the fragrance trend, the formulation format, be it cream, it could be a bar, it could be a serum, could be a powder, and the formulation claim.
Skin protection, anti-aging, UV protection, hair strengthening. As a supplier, we have a compelling value proposition for customers of all types and sizes. This, we believe, is truly unique. The full formulation concept, as we've mentioned several times today, also referred to as the one-stop shop. This was a real case example initiated in a meeting between an Iberchem salesperson with a large Turkish consumer goods manufacturer. The boxes at the top attempt to explain the typical process with the customer. Box one, we uncover the problem they have. What is their challenge exactly? In this case, the customer team is tasked to develop a new skincare range. We then take that away. We research the key market trends relevant to the target market and the consumers in that market. In this case, hygiene, nature, wellness, sustainability.
Our formulation teams then select from the formulation bank or create new formulation concepts. These are then fragranced with fragrance selections aligned with the market trends and those full formulation samples sent to the customer for review. The customer then has the benefit of shortcutting their in-house development process. We have the benefit of entering into their brand discussions and developing sales across our whole portfolio. The slide images at the bottom there, they're from the presentation to the customer team and accompanied the full formulation samples, details of what they are and why we selected them. This particular opportunity is progressing as we speak, and again, we see increasing number of these coming towards us as we go forward. Parfex, the business that we acquired last year, creates fragrances principally for premium personal care and fine perfumery markets.
Leveraging the natural raw materials that are available in the region, it further enhances our position in the creation of higher value fine fragrances and will play an important role in our plans to increase our sustainable fragrance offerings. Of course, sustainability is, has long been embedded in Croda's business for many, many years, even before it was a recognized area of value to customers. We see many areas where we can evolve our position now in fragrances. We'll see increasing launches of new fragrance collections based on natural raw materials. In 2021, the sales of natural collections doubled, okay, more than doubled. We expect this trend to continue. In the area of innovation, the fragrance needs are in the core Croda research programs, as Nick mentioned earlier. Look at process innovation, new fragrance delivery systems, and new raw materials.
In this area of complementary technologies, sharing our knowledge can improve fragrance effectiveness, reduce consumption, and improve sustainability. Finally, we plan a new creation center at the Parfex site in Grasse, focused on the creation of new natural collections. I hope you can see that all of this activity supports the Consumer Care strategy to move to a more natural based portfolio, more sustainable, targeting premium market segment. As leading Tier 2 in the market, Iberchem has delivered an impressive 14% underlying compound growth rate over the last decade, driven by its emerging market positioning and faster customer business model. We achieved just under GBP 180 million worth of revenue in 2021 with robust margins. Encouraging business performance given the impacts of lockdowns in the developing world and of course, input cost inflation.
We remain on track to realize our ambition of creating a EUR 400 million business in 2025, underpinned by a robust and proven Iberchem trading model delivering strong organic growth, a synergy plan which is delivering and leveraging the Parfex brand values through the extended sales network. Return on sales will be broadly in line with peers with our agile model offsetting our focus on the more cost-conscious local and regional customers. The increased focus on fine perfumery and natural fragrances provides the opportunity to enhance the margin further. We're investing to deliver sales synergies and also continually looking at how to accelerate growth into the geographies where we're not yet present in a significant way.
I really hope that you can understand why we are so excited about the opportunities ahead of us, and also why our offer to customers is unlike any other F&F company. We have strong market differentiation. We have an exciting standalone growth trajectory. Our sales synergies are on track, and we are realizing additional value from the full formulation capability. I hope you're already aware that we're holding an event at the Iberchem HQ in May, in Murcia, in Spain, and of course we look forward to welcoming you there as well where you can learn more. Now I'm just going to finish with a short video about Parfex, which I think will give you a very good flavor of the brand, the organization, and the value within this portfolio.
All right. In summary, we have two big growth engines in Consumer Care, Beauty Actives and our F&F business. Driven by Beauty Actives number-one position in the fastest growing active technologies, we expect strong performance to continue with mid- to high-single-digit % sales growth. F&F standalone growth trajectory will continue due to its unique market position and emerging market exposure. This will support further double-digit growth with additional benefits from revenue synergies to come. Home Care is also a high growth business, albeit from a much lower base, and as its two technology platforms drive industry innovation, that will underpin annual growth of at least 10%. A reinvigorated Beauty Care business is targeting consistent low- to mid-single-digit growth enabled by strong customer demand for sustainable alternatives.
Our expectations are for the Consumer Care sector as a whole to achieve compound annual growth rate of 5% before the additional revenue synergies from Iberchem and Parfex. This means that Consumer Care will become at least GBP 1 billion in sales by 2025. Although we already deliver sector-leading return on sales, our strategy will drive even stronger profit margins, ensuring continued value creation and excellent returns. In conclusion, our Consumer Care business has evolved significantly over the last few years. Today, it is highly differentiated, comprising four businesses, all with market-leading positions in the fastest growth areas. Our focus is on fast-growing niches, high margin and high growth. How do we achieve that? By leading in sustainability and innovation, and we're doing both of those. We've increased our proximity to our customers.
Consumer Care, a global business capable of supporting customers, both big and small, anywhere in the world. All of that is generating more consistent sales and stronger profit margins, ensuring a stronger growth profile for the years ahead. Let me stop there, and we are all happy now to open it up for some questions. Okay, let's start then.
Hi, Charlie Webb from Morgan Stanley. Maybe just first around some of the growth rates, and I think this probably most relates to Iberchem, but perhaps Consumer Care as a whole. As we think about inflation and emerging markets, a lot of the charts are saying obviously a lot of growth in emerging markets. Probably when we think about this inflation hitting the consumer, it's probably gonna be most in emerging markets. When you look at Middle East, Africa, parts of Asia, and you know, even Eastern Europe, you know, there's gonna be a big squeeze on the consumer. Just your thoughts there, whether those growth rates you're kind of citing of the past really hold true as we think about the future here and possible risk of down trading and what else could happen from that.
Certainly as it relates to Iberchem, given more of that is focused on EM. And then second question, just on beauty, Beauty Care. Why has Croda underperformed the market growth over the last five years? I think it was 2011 to 2021, your chart. But just what's led to the underperformance there? I think you showed the market's growing 5%-6%. You've grown 2.5%. Just any thoughts there and what's changing as we look ahead?
Yeah. I think, well, let's start with the second one. Yeah, I mean, you know, to say we've underperformed the market in the last five years, I think is wrong. I think we've underperformed the market in probably two of those five years. I mean, if you do the compound, you can get there. 2016, 2017, 2018 were excellent years for Croda, if you look back at the growth rates, and Beauty Care was doing very well. If you look at 2020, it was all about the Chinese effect and the American trade war. We had two issues there. We had the trade flow issue from America and also from China, and we had the Daigou effect , which is quite unusual for Croda.
We had two macro effects in one, which hit Chinese sales for that one-year period. The growth rate for China traditionally has been, you know, high single digits. It was significantly negative for one year because of those two factors. It's back to high single digits as it was a sort of one-off intervention macro. That drove a perceived underperformance. It was actually in China and a little bit in America. Everything else was doing well. Of course, we had the pandemic for one year. Much as we wanna spend on cosmetics when you can't go out, you can't spend on cosmetics. We had two macro effects, two big effects, which compounded over two years to give us the issues.
I think if you look back at, you know, particularly 15, 16, 17, and 18, the run rates there, they're very solid. I think, you know, going forward, the one thing that's changing, and you can feel it, you can see it hopefully, in the present, there's a structural shift in sustainability. Absolutely. You know, we could see this before. But, you know, listen to L'Oréal. You know, just listen to them. You know, that means huge amounts of project change in their organization. Lots of coding of different formulations. And of course, they're not alone. They're the leaders of the industry, so people will follow. I think the thing that's getting us more confident about the growth rates is that combination.
You know, I know we're scientists, but sustainability and innovation, you have to have them both. We've got them both. What's coming, what's more powerful than ever is the sustainability trend, which is unlocking value. You can probably see it, I hope you can see it in every single presentation. You know, it's slightly different. You know, if you saw us three years ago, we had an emphasis on sustainability, but the emphasis now is right in the center of the business, and it's because the growth's there. We can feel it, and we're getting locked in into two, three year contracts now with multinational. We never did that. That's a clue that, you know, they really need us, and we really need them as well. We're locking ourselves into revenue streams that we didn't have before.
It's giving us confidence to invest more. I would say that on the whole personal care side. You know, for all of us, we have to demonstrate that through consistency. You know, it's nice words, but I think what we're trying to get across underneath this is, you know, look at the opportunities. You know, it's not two or three opportunities, it's several opportunities in each of their businesses. That's the thing for Jez and myself, it's great because, you know, we've got lots of opportunities. Our challenge is to make sure we're prioritizing the investment in the right areas. I would say that. Your first question was all about?
Emerging markets.
Emerging markets. Yeah. I'll play Jez in on just our logic of how we're thinking about the growth rates, and then we'll come back to you.
Are we on? Okay. In terms of how we're seeing things develop, I think we've got the confidence from that structural changes going on that allow us to sort of see things going forward. Clearly, in the short-term, there is some sort of e.g., global economic risk, around how that develops. We're not seeing that yet. You know, we're seeing very strong consumer demand carrying on in all of the main markets in which we operate. We're also seeing a return in the emerging markets, particularly in Iberchem. Last year, it was a tougher market for a number of those emerging markets. Lower COVID vaccination rates, more of an impact therefore compared with the developed markets. Certainly we're seeing a progressive growth across those emerging markets.
We expect to be back at those medium long-term rates that we've seen in the emerging markets as well. I mean, clearly, yeah, it's quite dynamic at the moment, but I would say the structural things that Steve's talked about in terms of growth, together with what we're currently seeing in terms of performance, gives us a lot of confidence over this. Even though, yeah, clearly one can't be completely immune, you know, depending how things develop.
I think I would add, Charlie, I mean, there's the volume price elasticity issue is clearly something that everybody's looking at. More of the consumer goods companies are looking at that, our customers at the moment, and you can see some stats around that. It's which is quite dynamic. So we're glued, 'cause we've got a lot of price mix in our revenue line, we're obviously glued on volume. We don't really talk about volumes, by the way, but actually at the moment we're obviously very much interested in that healthy demand continuing with volumes, and we're certainly seeing that continue. So we're not seeing any negative volume as a consequence of pricing going forward.
I think the industry, for the first time in probably over a decade, it's got inflation right through it. When your customers are putting prices up and your suppliers are and everybody is, then everybody's putting, you know, those prices through. Obviously inflation is rising. The question for everybody is, you know, what's the impact of that? Because you can look at that two ways. You can get yourself very excited about a scenario that says, "Actually it's a temporary thing, and actually long-term this demand's here." Equally, you can look at it the other way and say basic fundamentals would suggest there might be a squeeze at some point, you know, second half of the year or beyond. Both of those scenarios could prevail. Nobody really. You're probably closer than we are is to better understand which one of those will prevail.
Either of those, we'll be in a good position. You know, it's a relative thing, of course. You know, we'll watch that. You know, the most important thing is keep our eye on the customers and the projects and making sure we're coded into more and more innovation projects, and we'll just be fine.
If I could just squeeze one more in really quickly on Croda's view on owning a flavors business. I mean, I get the fragrance argument around, you know, the one-stop shop, but flavors doesn't really fit in there. So how do you see that going forward? I know you said it was kind of something you'd look at down the line.
I think we don't rush to judge. We'll say that first. I mean, plenty of people, we have plenty of inbounds, obviously after the acquisition, quite a lot, you know, for people looking at the business. You know, for Croda, we, if we don't know a business, we like to run it first to make sure it's, you know, it can grow. You know, when we look at that business, it's got great growth, it's delivering. It doesn't need a huge amount of our attention, so it will grow. We'll grow the EBITDA. It's not a distraction for people in the business here. That's great. We'll continue to hold that. You know, we'll see. We'll review that, you know, on a regular basis.
I think a lot will depend on where we see acquisitions, you know, and if we need that to fund anything else that we think is really exciting in the core bits of Consumer Care or in Life Sciences. If we do, then we can, you know, we can make a decision there, but there's no decision short term other than we'll keep running it. If we can grow the EBITDA, then obviously, the multiples in that space are very healthy. For every 1 million of EBITDA we grow, you know, you can get a lot back if and when we decided to sell that. There's no plan to do that in the near term.
Hello. Good afternoon.
We can hear you.
You can hear me? Thank you. Good afternoon. Sebastian Bray of Berenberg Bank speaking. I have three questions, please, but they're all quite short. The first is a technical one on quarterly trading. Slide 10 showing the 2% year to date 2022 price increase in consumer care. Is this an annualized figure, or does it effectively mean if we keep going at this rate, we do 8% for the full year? Thank you.
Always a traded question, Sebastian. Well done. Jez?
I was waiting for the other two. The annualization from last year. Last year we had about 17% raw material price increase across the board, and that was fairly typical of Consumer Care as well. That converted to about a 9% sales price increase by the time you allow for those other increases in freight and energy and so forth. I think that 9% would convert to 3%-4% annualization effect this year. That's the bit that's already in the price as we enter this year. Because we saw that steady quarter-on-quarter increase in pricing. That's to roll through 3%-4%. That's already in, sort of guaranteed if you don't change prices.
We then saw another set of changes of increases in raw materials for the January quarter, the first quarter. That's gone through as well, and we've fully recovered that. You know, on top of that, therefore, we're estimating probably around 5%-6% on sales price effect so far. It depends what happens from here. We thought that we were probably gonna see a little bit more of a leveling out in terms of a lot of the raw materials for second quarter, given the disruption of the last four or five weeks, and the global events and so forth around that. That is pushing raw material prices higher into what would be a sixth quarter.
Therefore, there's a number of price increases going through for the second quarter as well. I think that it. Yeah, you could easily get to 8%-9% again. If we continue to see increases, we might see it level out as we go into the latter part of the year. The key thing is the Croda price recovery model is working exceptionally well. We continue to recover those prices. We don't see any reason why that wouldn't happen going forward. Therefore, you know, it'll be what it'll be, and we'll recover it. Okay.
Well, thank you. The second question, the reference to the ECO plant on slide 60. In 2023, when the sales are shown as having increased and the EBITDA seems to be settling around 30%, is that plant full then? Is it fully ramped at that stage?
Dave, open up, and then we'll pass to Jez. It's on the sales side, Dave.
On the sales side, yeah. I mean, it's plant's been running now consistently for just over a year, I think as Susanna alluded to. We're really starting to see some great new opportunities coming in from customers. The market's really starting to wake up to the value proposition of eco bio-based surfactants. We're bringing in lots of new opportunities that are consuming that green EO in the form of green alkoxylates. Yeah.
In terms of the profitability, yes, it will be EBITDA profitable this year. We should be exiting the year into EBITDA profitability as well. We're still only, you know, around 50%-60% of the potential capacity of the plant. Of course, being a continuous plant, which is very unusual for Croda, actually, the more you utilize the plant, the better the economics get. Driving further volumes through is the key way that we improve the profitability of that. We'll have to spend a little bit of CapEx downstream because, of course, we're not trying to make EO, we're trying to make downstream alkoxylates surfactants. We'll spend a little bit of CapEx to debottleneck the downstream.
Essentially, we should be able to grow for another seven or eight years before we probably get towards the maximum capacity of the plant, 'cause we built a plant that was essentially nearly twice as big as what we currently or what we were then using. There's a lot of improvement to come through. This is an unusual plant for Croda being particularly geared to volume. The more volume that we can develop along the lines that Dave said in terms of the development of sustainable surfactants, the better the economics get from the plant. Key thing for us is after a difficult period, it's going up year-on-year in terms of profitability.
I think I would add to that, Sebastian.
This is a great example of when you're disrupting and taking a leadership position, sometimes you have to go through a bit of pain with the investment, you know, probably more pain than we'd like. The opportunity now, you can start to see it coming through. We've always said we would need the industry leaders to make that change. L'Oréal, you heard that there and Unilever are the ones that are doing that. That's catalyzing further people doing that. For us, you know, when we reflect on it, yes, we've had a bit of pain, but, you know, the investment was very well done. We're investing ahead of the growth. Now we're starting to see the growth. It's great.
It's great to develop other business as well on the back of that as well.
Thank you. Quick last one.
Yes.
The reference to 33% of the actives portfolio being biotech on slide 50. If I then go to slide 85 and look at the GBP 160 million-165 million of skin actives given, is the logic you've got GBP 55 million of biotech sales. Firstly, is that correct? Secondly, what does that give you in personal care? Thank you. In terms of share.
Arnaud, do you wanna kick that off?
Not naturally. I'm not sure that I understood all the question.
The question's around your biotech sales today. You know, we can respond to that. You know, how big is it? The impact it has in the industry, I think.
Percentage of sales of biotech?
Yeah.
Is it going now?
Percentage of biotech is around 30% for Sederma.
Is that equal to GBP 55 million, roughly? Because if you go to page 85 of the slides, this is about 160-
Well, I'll answer that. I mean, it's 33%. You can draw your own conclusions to that, but you're not far away to be fair. Yeah.
Okay. Thank you.
Hi, this is Sam Perry from Credit Suisse. You've spoken about the various advantages of Iberchem, and the ability, well, what the fragrance business brings in in terms of offering the last piece of the puzzle. Why wait until that acquisition to bring that in, given the distinctive advantages in terms of, I'm sure that you would have been able to do this before?
Well, if we don't have a fragrance company, then, you wouldn't be able to do it. I mean, you can borrow the fragrance, I suppose.
I mean, why not acquire into this area before?
Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, we tried to. You know, we looked at Iberchem four years before we bought it. We nearly bought it then. You know, we had the bilateral on it, but it was Jez and myself just couldn't get there on value, if we're honest. We've been looking in the space for about five years. You know, we take our time. We know what we're looking for, and our model, our thinking is a bit different to probably what you think. You know, we're not trying to, you know, we're not trying to compete, Richard, with the major Tier 1 players, you know, the top four. But we have a different business model, and our model will pick up business in all areas of the industry.
Sometimes you've got to buy yourself time. You know, we know what works. The reason Iberchem screened well for Croda, it was the best Tier 2. Not because it's the biggest, it just had the right geographic exposure. It had the right culture. It's a brilliant innovation model, and we'll try and bring that to life for you when you go down. It ticked our boxes, whereas plenty of others wouldn't. Sometimes you've got to play a patient game to do that. I think the Formulation Academy is the glue that pulls it all together. You know, because people come. If you wanna really get a brand to market, you're looking for the claim. You have to get a claim that's a bit different if we're moving in the premium luxury end.
We're the go-to company that can provide the claim. If we can provide the claim, then we can do. As Susanna said, it's the sensory benefits of the product. It's the formulation together. It's the fragrance that then goes in there. You build it up from there. It's the claim that hooks people into brand development in the consumer space and the home care space. Richard, anything else on that or?
No. Just to repeat what you said, really, Steve. I mean, we looked at Iberchem a few years ago. We looked at a number of other companies in the interim as well, but none of them was quite right. Yeah, it had been a missing piece of the puzzle for some time, but we were patient about waiting for the right company to fit it, as simple as that. If we could have bought it earlier, then, yeah. These things, something good planned.
Yeah. Timing. Mm-hmm.
Just on the biotech piece, you highlighted the four big-ticket items. What, roughly, would they be in terms of sort of revenue? Sort of ballpark?
Well, you know, if you look at a product launch historically, you know, in Arnaud's or Susanna's presentations, they're normally a successful product launch in Croda is like $1 million over three years. You know, it's not a needle mover, but there's plenty of them. I think in these big bet areas, the key point to get across that it's not big CapEx, it's big opportunities. Therefore, the ones that Nick talked about are four platforms. Underneath each platform, there's several products. You know, we're starting to look at GBP 10 million opportunities there rather than GBP 1 million. Let's say $10 million opportunities rather than $1 million opportunities in each of those products in those platforms. Some of these are very significant.
We've been working with quite a number of them for four or five years. You know, you've heard us talk about Enza and Nautilus, and we haven't really talked to you about that. You hear it quite a bit more now because some of these products are now starting to come to market. You buy R&D ahead of time, and now we have to scale up. The interesting thing as I talked to Nick is that, you know, the demand's there for them. The products are there. And actually, you know, the challenge is the manufacturing scale-up, which is the issue, which is normally the easy part. And that's something that we have to. We're catching up with the manufacturing scale-up because we know the demand's there.
That's a good place to be because the innovation's there. It's proven in the laboratories. We just need to scale it now. Nick, do you wanna?
Yeah. I think the only thing to add to that, I think as you alluded to, Steve, is the best way to consider each of those big bet projects is containing multiple products within it, multiple product outputs. Each of those might be between GBP 1 million and GBP 10 million, which is kind of a traditional Croda hit rate. You know, we've got an interesting model where we can find actually ways to seed the market with new technologies quite early, get that customer feedback, so we don't, you know, we don't have to wait till the end of the process to get it through. I think each of those might therefore contain GBP 10 million, GBP 20 million, GBP 25 million, GBP 30 million, you know, over the lifetime of the innovation projects that we do. One thing within R&D is nothing's guaranteed.
We've just got to make sure that our model works effectively to get as many products as we can.
Okay. Yeah, Sebastian.
It's Sebastian Bray from Barclays. I've got two questions on biotech as well, and then one on Home Care.
Sure.
How should we think about costs? I assume you have to be competitive. Do you have to be at par with synthetic alternatives? Can you get there if you don't have the scale, or does it not matter as much because of the value proposition that you bring?
I think in the presentation, Sebastian, we tried to articulate that we're not really about building big bio-based building block materials. You know, Croda's innovation model is about niche and specialty actives. Some of the cost barriers that you're talking about, or the price barriers perhaps don't exist for, or not to the same extent that we're looking for. I think if you went back 10 years ago, the techno-economics of biotech would be prohibitive.
Both the strain engineering to be able to produce the materials, but also importantly, the downstream processing to actually enable the output and separation and scale-up weren't really available. I think the industrial transformation is supporting that now. You're absolutely right. One of the major elements of this in biotech is to make sure you get the right economic output and you get the, you know, the picking and developing the strain is right at the beginning of the process. It's probably the most important decision you make before you move on with the rest of it.
You talked about gene editing. How do consumers perceive that if it has explicitly or implicitly a GMO label?
Gene editing, I think, was in the Sederma presentation. My reference was to synthetic biology and, you know, other people might talk about it as genetic modification. If you went back again 10 years and tried to introduce this material within a Consumer Care application, it wouldn't have got through the door. I think that what people recognize now is that the bigger headwinds that customers are facing around sustainability is starting to trump some of the decisions. It was a rather perverse risk that they were perceiving in the past. There wasn't really any scientific risk. It was more of a, you know, a marketing risk that we're dealing with to try and eliminate it.
Now, I think that certainly the leading consumer companies are starting to educate their clients in a different way, and they recognize that it's going to be very difficult to achieve their sustainability targets, their decarbonization targets, unless they consider at least this, you know, synthetic biology as a route to generating new materials.
On synthetic biology, the products that we will sell will be not genetically modified, that the organism who produce it is. So that's something very different. We already have spoken to big customer, and they said, "If your active is not genetically modified, we see no problem. If the way you manufacture it by a microorganism genetically modified, we see no problem." It is also an evolution where we go.
Okay.
Yeah, last one on Home Care.
Yeah.
How excited would you be about the category if you didn't have the ECO plant?
Ed, do you want to?
Yeah, I mean, you know, the ECO plant plays into the trend we talked about with regards to sustainable cleaning. That's just one area of sustainable cleaning. I mean, there's lots of other, you know, areas of sustainable ingredients that get us into that space. Even without the ECO plant, we'd still be very excited about Home Care. Absolutely.
I think what you're seeing is a structural trend which is alike to and aligned to personal care, big move to sustainable ingredients. You know, you talk to all the home care customers, most of their brand development is in sustainable ingredients. If it wasn't in sustainable ingredients, we probably wouldn't be as excited. Because it is, you know, we're very excited.
Any more for any more? Charles.
Thank you. Charles Eden from UBS. I just wanted to ask on the margin target, obviously above 25% going forward. We've heard a lot about the growth opportunities and clearly growth is the priority. How should we think about that margin progression on a sort of three to four year view? Is it consistently converging back up towards, if not getting to that 30% that personal care used to be? How should we think about the annual progression on margin? 'Cause clearly you haven't put a hard target out for 2025 like you have on sales for Consumer Care. Then my second question is a lot of talk on innovation, sustainability and, you know, completely agree with all that. That's where the customers are going.
How should we think about R&D budgets, CapEx, and you know, you've talked in the past about 6% of sales as a normalized level? Is that still the right level given all of these exciting growth opportunities?
Well, let me answer the second one. I'll play Jez in on the margins. I mean, yeah, I mean, the way we look at it is, you know, there's quite a lot of. Because of the growth, there's quite a lot of growth, and there's a lot of CapEx numbers that are floating around with you. You know, the way we see it is the CapEx for Croda is not really changing. We're not getting more capital intensive. You know, we don't need more capital incrementally to get the revenue streams we need. It broadly screens for 5%-7% of CapEx we need as a percent of sales, with the one addition on that which is the healthcare investment that sits on top.
You know, we'll talk to you in very much the same way in later in the year where we'll talk about all the growth opportunities there and the big bet R&D project. You know, it's really exciting. You know, we're investing incrementally more in that space because of the big opportunities ahead, and, you know, we'll bring that to life with you. Generally, fine. We're fine with the CapEx numbers of sort of, you know, around 5%-7%, plus the healthcare on top. You know, in there, we are still working very hard on decarbonization around the business, you know, and there will be some CapEx in there, but it's not as big as you think.
You know, for us, we're different to the big players where, you know, there's big CapEx there being quoted. We don't think we need that. We think a lot of it's just clever Croda management in doing that with some new technologies. We think we can hit the decarbonization targets with modest investment there. In terms of R&D, I mean, the exciting thing is the R&D is really picking up. You know, we acquired Iberchem, 125 people. Most of those are R&D. We're now at 280 people. Literally all the incremental people in is R&D. So we're buying R&D businesses and we're investing in them. Iberchem, you'll see, is a very significant part of that is R&D as well.
I think in the acquisitions that we're buying, they're more R&D-focused anyway. We feel all we need to do is just keep, you know, keep consistent investment, nothing significant. But we are investing a bit more in the big scale projects. Yeah. Not CapEx, big opportunity projects. Just make sure you get that right. They're great, but, you know, there's a few handful of people that Nick needs to really think about that. It's not armies of people and empires of people. You know, again, that's it. You'll see it. You'll see the R&D spend for Croda naturally move up, as we, you know, and as we become more of a knowledge. What we're doing is we want more knowledge in the business.
That tends to mean you want more scientists, dermatologists, pharmacists, agronomists, you know, and more and more drug delivery experts. That's where the direction of travel is. But I don't think you're gonna see a massive significant change in R&D spend over the next two or three years.
Yeah. Can I just add to that, Steve? I think the other thing that historically Croda has been very good at is the hit rate from our innovation pipeline. The proximity to customers always means we get a better chance of getting product out there. You know, we're not working in the blind, and I think that's one of the critical elements of this. We can still be as effective. You'll see that illustrated in the NPP numbers, you know, the percentage of sales that we're getting from products launched in the last five years, or which are patented. You know, we're managing to improve that year on year and in line with the investments that we're making. Jez.
Yeah. Last point.
Okay. The other thing to mention on CapEx, of course, is that we've got the reinvestment of the proceeds from the Performance Technologies disposal and so forth, with over GBP 750 million to come. We like organic CapEx for that, for a big chunk of that reinvestment because it's lower risk, it's faster, we're not paying away goodwill. It's a great way for us to invest around strengthening the growth here in Consumer Care and driving that growth in Life Sciences. On the margin target, the reason that we've been a little vague, I guess, in terms of staying over 25%, and we were just short of 25% last year, is because of the different business mix in there.
First of all, the Personal Care business as we used to know it, Beauty Actives and Beauty Care, that delivered 30% return on sales. We don't see a reason for that to certainly deteriorate from that level. We have the Fragrances and Flavours business around mid-teens, and we have the Home Care actually just in the mid-high single digits in terms of that margin mix, giving us the 25% overall. What we want to do is we wanna continue to see Personal Care at 30% +. We definitely believe, as Richard referred to, that we can bring the F&F up to the same level as the Tier 1 .
'Cause although it's a smaller customer, you know, we're targeting the smaller customers in emerging markets, and therefore, maybe, you know, you might have slightly lower pricing there. Of course, it's a more agile business, and it's got less cost in it, so we can probably make that difference up. We can start to look at the bottom end of the 20% type level. Then the key driver in Home Care through this focus on the combination of eco and the fabric area is that we wanna drive up to our 20%. Generally, we're looking for at least 20% Return on Sales in those businesses. When you put them in the mix, that's what gives us the confidence that we can drive the Return on Sales up into, you know, to be north of 25.
Exactly how that flows will depend on the different growth rates. Because of course, if you're very successful at growing F&F, you know, we know that's dilutive to the overall percentage, but we're driving a lot of shareholder value. That's why we're a little vague in terms of what it will be, but it'll be into the high 20s% in our view.
Thank you.
Great. Let's call it a day there. I mean, please do, if you wanna join us just outside for a drink, Lambrusco, sorry about that, but. No, I'm only joking. You know, we've got the team here, and by all means, spend some time with the team. You know, there's a key message that we wanted to try and get across too really. It's trying to showcase the breadth of the opportunities and why we're excited across all of the businesses in Consumer Care. Hopefully, that came through. You know, you can take that information away and start to look at that. Certainly ask the team if you want. The other thing, it's all about meeting the team.
You know, it really isn't just about Jez and myself. We've got a deep team, and it's a group of people that work very well together with one thing in mind, which is to add great value in front of customers. They know their way to do that. Well-schooled in Croda and great in front of customers, and that's what we like. You know, we'll leave you with that. Thanks again for coming. Then, you know, if people wanna hang around outside, you're very welcome to. Thank you.