Beauty giants, including Chanel, L'Oréal, Estée Lauder and Groupe Clarins, have formed a new consortium to improve traceability in key ingredient and packaging supply chains across the cosmetics industry.

The Traceability Alliance for Sustainable Cosmetics (TRASCE) is made up of 15 founding members: Albéa, Chanel, Clarins, Cosfibel group powered by GPA, Dior, The Estée Lauder Companies, Groupe Pochet, L’Occitane en Provence, L’Oréal, Merck, Neyret, Nuxe, Sensient, Shiseido and Sisley.

The consortium, initiated by Chanel and supported by FEBEA, the French federation of beauty companies, is looking to help accelerate the sustainable transformation of the cosmetics sector by initiating and encouraging common approaches to progress in traceability.

TRASCE said that the founding members have all committed to working together to “map their supply chains across the entire value chain”. This will be done via a common digital platform Transparency-One, which will guarantee each supplier the ownership, security and confidentiality of the data they share, such as ingredients or components used, origins, names and activities of suppliers and processing sites.

Chanel forms cosmetics consortium to improve traceability

Julien Garry, international director of purchasing and packaging innovation development packaging at Chanel Parfums Beauté, said in a statement: “The essential and demanding work of mapping our supply chains carried out in recent years has allowed us to understand the main limits of the exercise.

“It is sometimes quite difficult for a single client to convince distant tier suppliers to commit to this process, when we do not exchange directly with them or when they do not meet the same regulatory requirements. Based on this observation, we proposed that the actors of the sector join forces to trace our supply chains as far and as quickly as possible.”

Guillaume Lascourrèges, director of responsible development for the Clarins Group, added: “The Clarins Group has been working for many years to improve its knowledge of its partners and control of its ecosystem. Our commitment to the TRASCE project, alongside other players in the cosmetics industry, is to pool our demands in order to strengthen the duty of vigilance throughout the value chain.”