Treatt Brand Guidelines: An 1886 Bond Street Oil Trader, Bury St Edmunds & Döhler

An essential-oil trader in the West End.

Treatt dates itself to 1886. The company’s own history page says its founder, Richard Court Treatt, began trading in essential oils on Bond Street in London that year. In 1906, it says, lavender oil from Spain became its first commercial import, and in 1913 the business became a limited company. These early dates come from the company’s own timeline, and are given here as its account.

The firm left London in 1971, when it set up its headquarters in the Suffolk market town of Bury St Edmunds, the company says. The East Anglian Daily Times reported in 2017 that Treatt’s visual identity of the time had been developed in the 1970s, around the move to the town, so the brand and the address arrived together.

In 1989 Treatt PLC was listed on the London Stock Exchange, according to its timeline, and in 1990 it opened a facility in Haines City, Florida, in the American citrus belt. It moved to a larger Florida site at Lakeland in 2002 and opened a sales office in Shanghai in 2006. By its own description it now works from bases in the UK, the US and China, sourcing and making natural extracts and ingredients for beverage, flavour and fragrance customers.

Its home site was rebuilt in the 2020s. The company says that in 2021 it opened a new facility in Bury St Edmunds, bringing its staff in the town under one roof, and that in 2025 it began expanding in China with a new office and development centre. Its leadership page lists an executive team that represents, in the company’s words, the interests of Treatt’s stakeholders.

Citrus, tea, coffee and aroma chemicals.

Treatt’s range starts with citrus. Its website groups its products into citrus, tea, coffee, botanicals, fruits, vegetables and chemicals, and sells into beverage categories from carbonates and juices to spirits, low and no alcohol drinks, ready-to-drink tea and coffee, and kombucha, as well as to flavour and fragrance houses. It describes capabilities such as authentic natural extracts, beverage systems, sweetness and mouthfeel solutions, and upcycled extracts.

The company’s timeline marks the steps. In 1996 and 1997, it says, it launched its Treattarome processing technology, a registered name, along with its first sugar-reduction products; it entered the tea market in 1998; and in 2001 it partnered with the British firm Endeavour Speciality Chemicals and began work in high-impact and aroma chemicals. In 2019, by the same account, it made its first coffee extracts and expanded its Lakeland plant in Florida.

Treatt also presents itself at the trade’s own gatherings. Its news pages from 2026 describe a stand at SIMPPAR, the Paris exhibition of raw materials for perfumery, and a place at the Chemical Sources Association roundtable in Newark, New Jersey. Those pages read as the company’s own marketing, and are given as such.

The most documented design moment came in 2017. The East Anglian Daily Times reported on 30 June 2017 that Treatt had called in the Cambridge design agency KISS to evolve the look and feel of the company while recognising its heritage. The new identity was built around a range of “Hero” images, each representing one of the main product categories, and was rolled out across signage, stationery, sales tools, uniforms and a new website, the newspaper said. KISS is still credited in the footer of Treatt’s website.

Design and documentation.

Flavour and fragrance houses sell to other companies, so their public identity is built for buyers, investors and future staff more than for shoppers. Their websites tend to divide the business into a few lines: flavours for food and drink, fragrances for fine perfumery and consumer goods, and ingredients sold in their own right. Mane groups its pages under flavours, fragrances and ingredients, for example, and Robertet adds natural raw materials and natural actives.

Creation is shown through people and places. Houses publish pages on their perfumers and flavourists, their training schools and their creation centres: Mane describes a perfumery school where apprentices train for at least two years, and Robertet lists a New York creation centre opened in 2006.

Natural materials are the other recurring story. Houses around Grasse lean on the region’s flower and plant heritage and on extraction methods: Robertet frames its sourcing as “Seed to Scent,” from the field to the finished creation, while Mane presents named extraction technologies and, in 2026, an experimental garden. Sourcing pages often pair those stories with certifications and supplier assessments, stated in the companies’ own words.

Ownership is part of the identity too. Some houses stress family control and independence; listed ones publish regulated announcements on shareholders and acquisitions. Robertet, listed in Paris since 1984, set out a change of shareholders in November 2024, and Mane’s change of chief executive in February 2025 kept the group in family hands, WWD reported. This guide sets out what can be checked about each house: who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its materials come from.

From a listed company to part of Döhler.

Treatt’s years as a listed company ended in 2026, when the German ingredients group Döhler, already a shareholder, bought the rest of the company.

On 29 April 2026 the boards of Treatt and Döhler announced a recommended cash offer for the shares Döhler did not already own. According to a TipRanks report carried by The Globe and Mail in June 2026, the deal won competition clearances in Ireland, Austria and the United States. Treatt’s regulatory announcement of 2 July 2026 said the court had sanctioned the scheme on 30 June and that the scheme had become effective, so that the entire share capital of Treatt was now owned by Döhler, through Döhler Finance Management B.V., an indirect subsidiary of Döhler Group SE. Treatt now trades as part of the Döhler group, after 37 years on the London market.

Its brand still leans on age and place. The website opens with a claim of more than 135 years of making tastes for drinks, flavours and fragrances, and its history page runs from Bond Street to Bury St Edmunds, Florida and Shanghai. The 2017 identity by KISS put product photography, not a single emblem, at the centre: citrus, tea and other raw materials as the brand’s face.

For a design guide, Treatt shows how an ingredients supplier can make its raw materials the brand image. Compare Frutarom, another extracts business absorbed by a larger group, and Givaudan, the Swiss flavour and fragrance house. For this guide we use a leaf green and a zest yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Treatt’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.