Givaudan donates $3.5 million to protect citrus

28-Mar-2019 - Last updated on 28-Mar-2019 at 18:21 GMT

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The University of California, Riverside accepted the gift earlier this month to help protect its Citrus Variety Collection from disease over the next decade.

What is now the UC Riverside Citrus Variety Collection began in 1910 as project of the Citrus Experiment Station and the USDA. “The purposes of the Citrus Variety Collection are threefold,” according to the Citrus Variety site. “One: to conserve and evaluate trueness-to-type of citrus and citrus relatives. Two: to provide a resource of citrus genetic diversity for research. And Three: to extend knowledge about citrus diversity.”

Funding fruit

The fragrance maker has been working with the collection at UC Riverside since 2006. And, in 2011, Givaudan endowed a chair at the collection. This year’s gift adds to that endowment, “assuring support of the collection in perpetuity,” notes the company’s media release.

The collection comprises more than 1,000 different varieties of citrus as living trees (at least 2 of each) and spans over 22 acres. And, the latest financial gift from Givaudan will help protect some of those trees beyond supporting the chair. 2.8 acres of the citrus (new tress and duplicates) will be enclosed in a screen structure to safe guard them from a citrus greening disease known formally as Huanglongbing.

According to the Givaudan media release, the disease is already prevalent (and killing citrus) in Florida, Brazil, and Mexico and was recently identified within miles of the UC Riverside Citrus Variety Collection. “A significant part of our latest gift to UCR will protect the collection from greening – today's main challenge to citrus,” Dawn Streich, global citrus product manager at Givaudan, affirms in her press. The nearly 3 acres of screened-in collection will be known as the Givaudan Citrus Variety Collection at the University of California, Riverside, for the coming decade.

Source material

The UC Riverside Citrus Variety Collection is at once a library and a laboratory. It “serves as a resource for a myriad of research projects from scion and rootstock breeding for the improvement of commercial varieties to the study of the biological activities of citrus limonoids as anticancer agents,” boasts the collection’s site.

And Givaudan’s ongoing relationship with the collection means that the company has terrific access to that resource. “This partnership gives us access to rare varietals, which combined with our creative approach to citrus, delivers unique insight for our customers– inspiring consumer preferred products around the globe,” Streich says.

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Deanna Utroske, CosmeticsDesign.com Editor, covers beauty business news in the Americas region and publishes the weekly Indie Beauty Profile column, showcasing the inspiring work of entrepreneurs and innovative brands.