Today we have the pleasure to sit down and chat with Mr. Massimiliano Mancini, CEO and Co-Founder of FlavourArt, the Italian flavour manufacturer who changed the vaping game and contributed to shape the industry we all love, one aromatic flavour at a time.
FlavourArt is a brand that everybody in the vaping universe associate to quality and values, variety and reliability, and plays a key role in the development of e-liquid recipes worldwide.
It’s not that unlikely the e-liquid you are vaping carries a FlavourArt flavour in its ingredient formulation!
A true pioneer in the vaping industry, the Italian flavour company FlavourArt discusses his humble origin, the outstanding present and what the future will holds.
Who is FlavourArt?
FlavourArt is an Italian company headquartered in Oleggio, a small township nearby Milan, Italy. We are a manufacturer of concentrated flavours and e-liquids, we supply food grade aromas for thousands of top-notch brands and e-liquid makers worldwide, and we also cater for players in the ordinary food and beverage industry.
During the past 14 years we have further expanded our reach with the incorporation of subsidiaries in EU countries and in Canada to better serve our North American side of business, as well as setting up partnership programmes with local companies and distributors worldwide.
We have now set a strategical step in Hong Kong and have a dedicated resident Business Development Manager, to further develop our existing fairly good business in the Asia Pacific region. Our plan is to gain a major foothold in a market area we consider the fastest-growing in the industry, and critical for the future of the industry as a whole.
We are ready to serve the APAC region even better than before with our Made in Italy quality product, especially Mainland Chinese flavour and e-liquid producers, e-cig manufacturers, distributors as well as individual vapers.
Currently we are considered amongst the top 3 flavour producers for vaping application, respected by our peers, highly regarded by users, and very beloved also in the DIY community.
We proud ourselves to have a wide portfolio of around 250 proprietary flavours and 50 ready to vape e-liquids. The majority of our products are DAAP-free, TPD-registered and compliant, and developed in our 5,000 sqm duly certified ISO9001 and ISO14001 facility where HACCP and GMP systems are applied in all production processes to ensure quality and safety.
How everything started?
When me and my wife, Ms. Anna Facchino, established FlavourArt back in 2006 we had a simple and unpretentious plan in mind: entertain a small scale and family run business dedicated to the production of food grade concentrated flavours and aromas.
Vaping was not an option. Not at all.
We have been involved in the food industry for 20 years, holding positions at the top-management level in multinational enterprises, and we were willing to continue such path in this business sector by offering our high quality Made in Italy aromatic creations directly to consumers and culinary enthusiast.
We setup an online shop in our website www.flavourart.com pretty much at the very beginning of our venture, and that proved to be key to our success from a revenue point of view but also from a marketing standpoint: we were just one of the very few flavour companies who offered an online store purchase experience to end users, and people started talking about us in forums, newsgroups and online bulletin boards.
Can you introduce us when FlavourArt stepped up and embraced vaping as a whole?
We honestly and literally had no clue what vaping was all about.
In 2009 we started receiving written enquiries and phone calls by individuals asking whether our flavours could be diluted and used for electronic cigarettes. 2009 was also the year we started witnessing the very first wave of mass-produced personal vaporisers and devices from Mainland China. So this triggered a possibility to study the topic better and we started thinking to develop liquid products dedicated to this unusual application, to be sold via our existing online shop platform.
10 years ago we had the unexpected opportunity to focus on entering a scene that did not existed yet, fully embrace it and mould it. It was that serendipitous discovery that made FlavourArt the company now many recognises as one of the leading flavour manufacturers in our vaping niche.
Going online enabled us to be reachable by literally everybody in the world, and the online communities of vapers in the internet started to discuss about us in dedicated forum threads, which represented a key role in our international success. We are grateful to vapers, without them FlavourArt would not exist.
Can you tell more about your products, for those who don’t know your brand yet
We offer a wide range of concentrated flavours and e-liquids to suit everybody’s taste, for a total of around 300 different choices of different profiles such as sweet, fruit, dessert, floral, savoury, tobacco, specials etc.
Our concentrated flavours line (orange cap bottle) is aimed mainly to distributors, e-liquid makers and DIYers, and being intended to be diluted and mixed together for crafting a recipe of your choice.
Our e-liquids line (blue cap bottle) is TPD-compliant and ready to vape. The ideal and hassle-free solution for those who don’t want or feel ready to mix and blend. We offer different free-base nicotine strength.
We also developed some hardware for smokers wishing to successfully switch. Our latest device effort is the FLUO Mini, a closed-pod system that proved to be remarkably successful. We filled in the pods with our proprietary flavours, and currently it’s distributed widely in Italy and EU.
Our products are in liquid form, water-soluble synthetic food-grade flavourings, carried in pharma-grade USP propylene glycol, safe for human consumption and its application is actually multi-purpose: candy-making, food, drink, bakery, confectionery, snacks, dairy, coffee, tea, pharmaceutical, beauty, etc.
They are synthetic in nature, therefore they are all chemical compounds, manufactured with USA and EU repertoire, FEMA GRAS synthetic flavour materials, few of them carry food grade essential oils and botanical extracts.
Unless otherwise stated, the majority of these concentrates do not carry any allergens, alcohol, sugars, protein, genetically modified ingredients, animal ingredients of any kind, preservatives, sweeteners or colours. They are all gluten and peanut free, suitable for diabetics, vegetarian and vegans.
In 2014 the vaping community expressed ongoing concern over ingredients such as DAAP (diacetyl, acetoin, acetyl propionyl) that may cause health issues on the pulmonary apparatus: FlavourArt actually recognised and addressed this matter already back in 2010 by removing diketones from the recipes and adhering to the principles of harm reduction and avoidable risk.
Let me also stress out the fact that we were the first – and the only one, as far as we know – flavour house that clinically tested the flavours’ aerosol’s emissions from a toxicological point of view, with the purpose to prove the harm reduction of our products in comparison to combustible tobacco cigarettes.
Tell us more about FlavourArt harm reduction research efforts
Through the project ClearStream Onward (www.clearstreamonward.com) we collected all the relevant scientific data to prove the harm reduction of the actual vapour produced by our flavours. Users are kept informed on the progresses and outcomes in the dedicated website, where they can be able to browse and dig the results of the analysis in full transparency.
We love and believe in vaping. We always wanted to put a protocol in place in order to always improve and develop safe products.
Being pioneers and innovators, we believed a continued investment into research and testing was needed, with safety being the main priority. In 2015 we partnered up with the biotech company FEM2-Ambiente (now TRUSTiCERT), a spin-off of the University of Milano-Bicocca, for a scientific venture aimed to test the cytotoxicity of our flavours’ vapour, in order to ensure that what we inhale is the safest it can possibly be.
Such joint venture represents a key investment for FlavourArt, and ClearStream Onward is our jewel in the crown, as we always have been concerned about ensuring consumer safety. It is of crucial importance we assess the types and the levels of emissions produced by e-cigs, and our investments in research will be always aimed to confirm the absence of heavy metals and harmful compounds from the vaporization process.
This ground-breaking scientific technological protocol is something never witnessed before in the whole vaping industry, and we proud ourselves for being the very first stakeholder to embrace this sensitive matter in due advance.
All the data and knowledge collected so far allowed us to be in compliance with the EU regulatory, and we believe it will help to get through the forthcoming FDA’s deeming regulation in USA.
Tell us more about the future projects of FlavourArt
We have been working tirelessly in the development of new flavours, new products and formats as well as new technology without compromising safety. We listened to comments and suggestions in order to serve better our clients and customer base.
COVID-19 had an important impact to everybody’s life and businesses, but this didn’t stop our constant will to research, create, innovate.
Even though we have a resident Manager in Hong Kong, for the time being shipments are arranged from our Italian headquarter. But we are planning to setup a proper production facility and an equipped warehouse in the forthcoming future, to serve better our APAC clients.
Is there something further you would like to say to our readers?
We all know our industry has a disruptive potential, which is uncomfortable to many, and we have in our hands the chance to advocate and provide a safer alternative to smokers. We are vapers, we love what we do. All our partners are passionate vapers, we all believe in a future without the harm of tobacco. We listen, we advocate, and we care, because we are one of you.
We could change statistics, we can make people live better lives and adopt less harmful lifestyles.
APAC region, especially Mainland China, is a market with a huge potential: according to the latest stats, China accounts 300 million smokers and 28% of adults do smoke. And by producing 40% of the world’s cigarettes, China is the largest manufacturer of combustible tobacco products: this is where vaping must interfere, saving millions of lives.
Never forget that vaping should only be regarded as a smoking cessation tool for current adult smokers, as it’s undoubtedly a safer alternative than smoking combustible tobacco. It’s not a game, and flavours are of crucial importance for such transition to a less harmful alternative. Never forget that our final mission is the achievement of a smoke-free society.
And we are proud to be considered one of the main protagonists of this revolution.
How customers, companies, industry stakeholders and interested parties can contact you?
We are reachable at the following channels. Feel free to contact us, we’d love to hear from you and address your enquiries to the responsible Manager in charge:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: flavourart.it
- Facebook: facebook.com/flavourart
- Instagram: instagram.com/flavourart_official
And on a final note, here is our online shop: www.flavourart.com/en/store/
We created a coupon code for your readers and all our friends living in APAC willing to purchase our product.
Feel free to use the following coupon code to get a 10% discount on the cart: FAapac
