At Laundry Sauce, our newest fragrance, Oregon Mint, was far from a happy accident. It was the product of meticulous planning, testing, and collaboration with the sharpest minds in agriculture.
Enter Chris Jenkins, the owner and operator of one of the largest mint farms on Earth. Since 2008, Chris has been on a mission to push the boundaries of what mint can do, developing varieties that transcend the ordinary and capture the extraordinary. His expertise in selecting the perfect mint for Oregon Mint—and guiding it from leaf to laundry detergent—is unmatched.
We caught up with Chris to hear about his journey into the world of mint, why this plant makes for such a special scent, and how he helped craft our one-of-a-kind Oregon Mint fragrance for Laundry Sauce.
Watch the interview here, or check out our Q&A below:
Let’s Start with Some Background. Tell Us a Little About Yourself.
I’m Chris Jenkins—I’m the owner and operator of one of the largest mint breeding programs in the entire world. I’ve been working with mint since 2008, about 15 ears. I know the plant inside and out. I develop new varieties for different fragrances and I’m pushing the mint plant into territories that it’s never been before.
What Makes Mint Special When It Comes to Fragrance?
Mint is a beautiful, versatile plant. But what makes it unique is that it’s one of the few fragrances that the human brain doesn’t get fatigued from. There are many facets to mint oil. It’s not just one category of fragrance. It’s a whole world unto itself and we hope to bring that to Laundry Sauce and let people smell it day after day.
What Type of Mint Did You Select for Laundry Sauce?
When I started working with Laundry Sauce, we evaluated dozens of different mint varieties. Working with Sabine, Laundry Sauce’s principal perfumer, we tested different spearmints and peppermints before we landed on one: cascade, which we thought was the best. It’s the premier mint variety that really shines in the Willamette Valley and the Pacific Northwest. It grows extremely well here. It has an amazing oil quality to it—very fresh and complex. It’s full-bodied but with a very clean smell.
Walk Us Through the Process of Crafting the Oregon Mint Fragrance for Laundry Sauce
The mint plant, like many other plants, has a whole range of oil glands on the underside of the leaf. It’s here that we find the rich compounds that give mint its unique flavor and fragrance. When we’re looking to harvest that oil, we start by going into the field, chopping the mint down, and letting it dry for a few days.
Once it’s dry, we go in with some machinery to chop the mint and blow it into a large tub that gets brought back to a central distillery. From there, we inject high-pressure steam that carries the mint oil into a vapor, which then condenses back into a pure oil and separates it from the plant material. There’s no chemical process involved. From there, it’s purified, filtered, and blended into fragrances—like the one we made for Laundry Sauce.
How Do You Approach Sustainability?
When it comes to cultivating mint, we’re focused on three things: ethical sourcing, traceability, and sustainability. We’re able to trace back every drop of oil to the field that it was grown from.
It’s amazing to work with a company like Laundry Sauce that “gets it.” They understand the ethics behind what we’re doing, and they understand the importance of traceability and supporting an agricultural community like we have here in the Pacific Northwest.
