The BIOLANDES story began in the late nineteen-seventies, when Dominique Coutière decided to found a company in the Landes region of southwestern France, near Bordeaux. His original idea was to distill the needles of the maritime pines growing there in the largest cultivated forest in all of Europe. Coutière improved the distillation techniques then in use and perfected an entirely automated continuous distillation process, which he also applied to the extraction of cistus derivatives a few years later. The pine extracts were used in perfumery and the distillation residues were valorized in an original way: they were composted and transformed into mulch for gardening, or dried and burned to produce energy. With its capacity to produce aromatic extracts in large quantities and with consistent quality, the company soon began to diversify. Starting in the late eighties, BIOLANDES decided to set up operations on site in the places where the finest aromatic plants are grown and gathered: in Spain in 1988, Turkey in 1991, Madagascar in 1995, Bulgaria in 1996, Morocco in 1998, Provence in 2004. Meanwhile, the company was also developing in France, where it opened a site in Grasse and began buying up prestigious raw materials suppliers, expanded its site in the Landes and implemented a strategy based on product diversification. Today, with all of its geographic and technical assets, Biolandes is recognized as a world-class specialist in natural products.