FEATURE
butter. “There’s nothing that’ll make you
fall in love more than a 3:00am job making
peanut butter, right?!” he says, laughing.
After getting married, the couple was
transferred to New Jersey and worked in
the Staten Island, New York Facility—a big
change of pace from the sleepy South.
But after five years at P&G, Ken had
an awakening that the corporate life was
just not for him. “I have an entrepreneurial
spirit and I’m kind of a jack of all trades,”
he says. In hindsight, he notes he probably
would have been better suited to start out
on the marketing or sales side, rather than
manufacturing side. “But, at the time, I
didn’t see a clear path to that.”
BROTHERS IN BUSINESS
“With fragrance, there’s a technical side to it
and a creative side… I felt like that would
really allow me to stretch out and use all of
the tools I had.”
Ken and Virginia
syntheses, and how to smell things. In
addition to a solid foundation in aroma
chemicals, Ken gained exposure to classic
chemical engineering. “I got to size heat
exchangers and calculate mass balances,
play with steam traps, learned quality
control systems, Gas chromatography
and direct current mass spectrometry [a
tool used to measure the mass-to-charge
ratio of one or more molecules present in
a sample]. They exposed me to a lot of
different things associated with chemical
processors and industries and the fragrance
industry.” He quickly learned that, unlike
with a lot of other materials, with fragrance
ingredients you couldn’t just do a qualitative,
quantitative analysis and be done. “There’s
also the added step of smelling it to make
10 | FRAGRANCENOTES.ORG | Issue 2, 2019
sure it smells right. It can meet all the other
specs and still smell wrong. So, you always
have to smell it. That’s where I learned
about an odor panel, and odor control, and
things like that. I didn’t realize it at the
time, but it was a great training ground and
a great foundation for what would become
my career.”
After graduating from college, the
industry was contracting, and SCM-Glidco
didn’t have space to hire him, so Ken took a
job with Procter & Gamble Company (P&G)
in Lexington, Kentucky. Working in in the
food division, he was a production manager,
process manager, and then in process control
as a chemical engineer. He recalls how he
met his first wife, an electrical engineer,
while he was rotating shifts making peanut
Once again, with the guiding hand of his
brother, Ken landed on his feet. After
leaving SCM-Glidco, his brother set out on
his own, hiring Ken to oversee sales, and
their company, Florachem, was officially
born. The brothers started out selling
naval stores-type ingredients, such as fatty
acids and pine oil, and eventually added
aroma chemicals because of their prior
experience. “There were a lot of flavor and
fragrance companies in New Jersey, and
we could bring in material from around the
world in larger quantities, break it up into
smaller quantities, and distribute it to these
small- to medium-size companies, which
was our sweet spot,” he says. The business
eventually grew to $20 million+ in revenue,
and the brothers sold it to an investment
company but stayed on in leadership
positions.
Over the years, Ken had built a
relationship with Daniel “Dan” G. Funsch,
who at the time was a salesman for and
later became chairman, CEO, and owner
of Intarome, a mid-sized manufacturer of
custom fragrances and flavors used in fine
fragrance, personal care, household, laundry
care, air care, cosmetics, and industrial and
institutional product applications. The two
would go on sales calls together, with Dan
selling fragrance and Ken selling ingredients,
and soon enough they became very good
friends.
After Dan purchased Intarome and
became the sole owner, he offered Ken a job,