Jean-Paul Janssens joins the Cleaning Products Europe Advisory Board

I've always enjoyed being involved with Cleaning Products Europe and contributing ideas behind the scenes. Joining the Advisory Board feels like a natural next step and gives me the opportunity to contribute in a more structured way. After many years in the industry, including at a large FMCG company, I also feel it's important to share experience, bring different perspectives together and help shape discussions that are relevant to where our industry is heading.

What keeps me interested is that formulation is never really finished. Consumer expectations change, new ingredients and new technologies emerge, regulations evolve, and sustainability creates completely new challenges. I still enjoy looking at a product and asking: why was it formulated this way, what makes it work, and could we do it better? That curiosity has stayed with me throughout my career.

FRAMES started from a fairly simple observation: there is an enormous amount of information about products and ingredients in our industry, but turning that information into something genuinely useful for formulators is much harder. We wanted to create formulation intelligence that helps R&D teams understand what is happening in the market and translate that into better and faster product development. Over time, FRAMES has developed from mainly providing formulation and market insights into a much broader platform combining product intelligence, formulation expertise, cost information, benchmarking and experimental support.

Working across very different markets taught me that there is no such thing as a universal cleaning consumer. Habits, water quality, washing equipment, climate, product formats and even people's perception of what "clean" means can differ enormously. South East Asia in particular made a strong impression on me because you see such a wide range of washing habits and conditions within the same region. It reinforced the importance of starting product development with how people actually use a product, rather than with how we assume they use it.

I'm particularly interested in how we can achieve better cost-performance with less chemistry and more intelligent formulation. That includes enzymes and biotechnology, more efficient surfactant and chelate/polymer systems, use of upcycled materials, new product formats and smarter ways of dosing products. I'm also fascinated by how much we can learn by systematically analysing formulations already on the market. Innovation doesn't always mean discovering a completely new ingredient; sometimes it comes from combining existing technologies in a much smarter way.

For me, it's the combination of people and content across the entire cleaning products value chain. You have ingredient suppliers, formulators, R&D leaders, technology companies and other specialists in the same room, which creates conversations that go beyond the usual. I particularly value the informal discussions between presentations, where people are often very open about the challenges they are facing. Those exchanges can be just as valuable as what happens on stage.

I'd like to see an even stronger connection between parties in the value chain and emerging technologies, in order to develop more successful cleaning products for the consumer. That means discussing not only what is new, but also what actually works, what can be scaled and what brings measurable value to consumers and the industry.

I would say: come with questions and be prepared to talk to people. Of course, the presentations give you a good overview of developments in the industry, but much of the value comes from meeting people who are working on similar challenges from completely different perspectives. You will leave with new ideas, useful contacts and, hopefully, at least one or two thoughts that make you look differently at something you are working on.