FAREVA: A Model!

Founded in France in 1990, FAREVA has undeniably established itself over the past 35 years as one of the world’s leading contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMO). Today, the Group employs more than 13,000 people across some 40 industrial sites worldwide, with projected 2025 revenue of approximately 2.1 billion euros. Its operations are structured around two main pillars: Pharmaceuticals & APIs on one hand, and the consumer market on the other, encompassing Beauty and Home Care. An update with Sandie Fraisse and Thibaut Fraisse.

An impressive journey that has always been family-driven, and a “market-focused” vision that works!

Sandie Fraisse: Our strength lies in the independence of our family-owned model, which is now reaching a key milestone in its succession. My brother, Thibaut Fraisse, has taken over as CEO, overseeing all of our Beauty and Home Care operations, as well as all of the Group’s support functions. Working alongside him, I handle institutional representation, the CSR roadmap, and FAREVA’s external outreach. This complementary partnership guides our industrial vision and our market strategy.

Thibaut Fraisse: In practical terms, in our markets, we structure our offering around clear areas of excellence: Homecare (household cleaning) and Beauty. Under the Beauty banner, we bring together all of our cosmetic expertise: Personal Care on the one hand (skin care, hair care, sun care, hygiene, and fragrance), and cutting-edge makeup on the other, driven by the creativity and technical expertise of Chromavis.
This organizational structure enables us to leverage a dual industrial strength:
· A model of local presence in skincare and homecare, with facilities deeply rooted in their respective regions to serve local markets with agility.
· An export capacity in makeup, where Chromavis generates more than 50% of its sales through exports to the world’s leading cosmetics brands.
Our mission goes beyond simple manufacturing: we collaborate closely with our clients, from the early stages of R&D and packaging through to large-scale industrial production.
In 2024 and 2025, we have allocated nearly 61 million euros in investments to our Beauty and Homecare businesses, representing nearly 30% of the Group’s total investments.
These financial commitments address several priorities: modernizing production facilities, increasing our industrial capacity, and integrating cutting-edge technologies. This is particularly evident at Chromavis, where we are constantly pushing the boundaries of formulation, textures, and process automation. We are also continuously investing in the digitalization of our plants and energy efficiency.
In 2026, the challenge will be to intensify synergies and the sharing of expertise across our various business units, while respecting the unique DNA and responsiveness of each site.
Morena Genziana’s appointment fits perfectly within this framework: her international experience in the cosmetics industry will help bridge the gap between skincare and makeup, enabling us to develop even more distinctive cross-category offerings for our customers.

The energy crisis, rising tariffs… What impact do these have on your business?

Sandie Fraisse: Tariffs cannot be circumvented; they must be anticipated. This has precisely been FAREVA’s long-standing approach: building a regionalized industrial network as close as possible to the end-consumer markets. By producing locally for local markets, we protect our operations and those of our customers from tariff barriers, while eliminating the uncertainties of intercontinental supply chains and enhancing supply chain responsiveness.
On the energy front, we’ve chosen to turn a global constraint into a driver of industrial performance. For several years now, our sites have been implementing solutions for photovoltaic self-consumption, heat recovery from our processes, and industrial water reuse loops.
This approach tangibly increases the resilience of our production facilities and enables us to offer our partner brands a secure, competitive value chain that is aligned with their own environmental goals.

What about the environment?

Sandie Fraisse: Sustainable development is inextricably linked to our industrial strategy. We do not view it as a constraint, but rather as a responsibility and a true driver of innovation and performance for our operations.
Because we support our partner brands throughout the entire lifecycle of their products, our environmental roadmap focuses on three major priorities:
· Climate: We have officially committed to the SBTi (Science Based Targets initiative) to ensure our emissions reduction is on a trajectory aligned with the Paris Agreement. This commitment is already being put into practice in our factories through energy efficiency, the deployment of renewable energy, and the optimization of our manufacturing processes.
· Preservation of natural resources: We take daily action to limit our freshwater withdrawals, expand the recycling and reuse of industrial water in closed-loop systems, and improve the efficiency of our treatment plants.
· Biodiversity: We have launched a program to measure our sites’ impact on ecosystems and implement tailored local action plans.
This commitment extends beyond our factories. Through the FAREVA Foundation, we support local educational and community initiatives, and our partnership with Planète Urgence enables our employees to carry out field missions as part of our Solidarity Leave program.
As a CDMO, our responsibility also includes helping our clients turn their own environmental ambitions into concrete solutions. Starting at the development stage, we can work with them on formulations, processes, and manufacturing choices to find the best balance between innovation, quality, performance, and reducing environmental impact. Balancing industrial performance with environmental performance is now an integral part of our business and, in our view, an essential element in providing sustainable support to beauty brands.

Nevertheless, the packaging sector is also facing challenges, particularly regarding plastics!

Thibaut Fraisse: Indeed, the packaging sector is currently undergoing a profound transformation, driven by regulatory changes, consumer expectations, and brands’ environmental ambitions. As a manufacturing partner, we’re approaching this transition with a high degree of operational rigor: increasing the use of post-consumer recycled (PCR) materials, thinning wall thicknesses, designing refillable systems, and systematically optimizing recyclability from the outset.
To manage these challenges and ensure project success, we rely on our industrial structure:
· Regional roots: Whenever possible, we prioritize local or regional sourcing, as close as possible to our plants and target markets. This approach reduces logistics flows, ensures on-time delivery, and allows for better cost control.
· The Group’s strength: we pool feedback and best practices across our various sites. A technical solution validated in one market can thus be quickly adapted to meet another need.
This sharing of expertise allows us to anticipate risks and minimize the economic impact of these changes for our clients, guaranteeing them packaging solutions that are responsible, high-performing, and competitive.

Is innovation, of course, a major focus?

Thibaut Fraisse: Every year, our teams develop and manufacture several hundred products sold by the world’s leading beauty companies. You’ll never see them associated with our name, and that’s precisely what our clients expect from us: our confidentiality agreements are strict, and this discretion is part of the service.
However, our innovation priorities clearly reflect major market trends:
· Formulations and sensory experience: We design hybrid and multifunctional products, combining unique textures with increasingly high-performance and sustainable formulas.
· Industrial foresight: Every innovation developed in the lab is formulated from day one to ensure perfect reproducibility when scaling up production on our lines.
· Accelerating time-to-market: Through our INNO Fast Track approach, we provide brands with turnkey concepts and formulas—already tested by our teams—to reduce the time between identifying a trend and its commercial launch.
The challenge is not just to move quickly, but to ensure every step is secure. This is the strength of our model: having our innovation and formulation teams work closely with our industrial experts to get involved very early on, from the initial idea through to large-scale production.