Background of the AromaWell Project
When the rose scent drifts from your diffuser in the morning, few realize the unseen struggles plaguing the traditional essential oil industry: producing 1 kg of rose essential oil devours 3,000 kg of fresh rose petals - equivalent to an entire year’s harvest from one mu of farmland. When the rainy season hits, excess moisture in petals slashes extraction rates by 15%, leaving producers like Shandong Huinong watching valuable raw materials go to waste. Worse still, commercial essential oils come with fixed ratios; aromatherapists can only shrug when a client asks for a “7:3 rose-lavender blend for better sleep,” forced to mix oils manually with unpredictable results.
Today, demand for “personalized aromatherapy” is surging: office workers crave crisp cedar-scented oils to ease stress, parents seek low-concentration blends safe for children, and brands like Shandong Freda (a downstream essential oil user) want custom scents for their skincare and diffuser lines. But traditional processes remain trapped—reliant on weather for raw materials, limited by one-size-fits-all formulas, and at odds with sustainability goals due to high energy use and waste.
It is precisely this mismatch between supply and demand that drove the AromaWell project. Leveraging synthetic biology, we built “microbial factories” using programmable Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer’s yeast) and Escherichia coli. By regulating their metabolic networks, we can synthesize key components - such as citronellol (for rose oil) and linalool (for lavender oil) - on demand. No more waiting for blooming seasons, no more wasting tons of petals, and no more fixed ratios.
But we know well that technology should never stay confined to the lab. So we took our solution to the real world: we knelt in Shandong Huinong’s workshops to understand their energy costs and optimized fermentation to cut expenses; we helped Shandong Freda design a custom ratio-adjustment module; we collected students’ ideas for “orange-mint blends” during campus events; and we addressed the public’s fear that “synthetic = unsafe.” This cycle of “technology meets needs, and needs drive technology” ensures that every whiff of AromaWell’s essential oils carries not just scientific precision, but the warmth of human-centric innovation.
