Think and create – R&D at Tate & Lyle

21 Jun 2022

We’re stepping up our investment in R&D, innovation and solutions development to become our customers’ growth partner. From our 2022 Annual Report, below we outline how and why innovation is a key enabler of our growth strategy.

Innovation and Commercial Development (ICD) uses its deep understanding of consumer trends and food and beverage categories, along with leading-edge science and technical expertise, to create solutions for customers which address growing consumer demand for healthier and tastier food and drink. It does this by bringing together scientific and commercial functions into one team, thereby providing a fully integrated approach to serving customers and helping them bring their products to the market faster. ICD not only creates ‘new to the world’ products, like our CLARIA® Functional Clean-Label Starches and DOLCIA PRIMA® Allulose, but also develops extensions to existing product lines, as well as new technologies and processes which make our business more efficient.

Our researchers and food scientists are experts in formulating food and beverages, working side-by-side with customers to leverage our skills and knowledge to reduce or eliminate sugar and calories from our customers’ products. But we don’t just take things out, we also improve the nutritional profile of products by adding structure, fibre and protein and offer other benefits, such as our stabiliser systems which allow food to travel over long distances. During the year, we launched 10 New Products and more than 30 new stevia sweetener solutions from our innovation pipeline.

SCIENTIFIC EXPERTISE

Our deep scientific knowledge in the fields of bio-chemistry and materials science are at the heart of our business. Our core capabilities in areas such as enzymology and fermentation, industrial scale up, drying and crystallisation and separation and fractionation, mean we are uniquely placed to create solutions for customers which address growing consumer trends such as sugar reduction, added fibre and clean label. Supported by our nutrition and regulatory knowledge, we carry out research with academic organisations around the world. This, alongside our intellectual property and our external partnerships and open innovation activities, gives us a strong, science-based innovation platform which we use to accelerate growth.

Investing in innovation

Consumer preferences are different around the world and so we have a global network of labs, which we call Customer Innovation and Collaboration Centres, where we work together with customers to make their products work in their local markets. During the year, we opened a new centre in Dubai to serve our customers in the Middle East, and in May 2022 we opened another centre in Santiago, Chile.

Investing in clinical research, promoting nutrition education

We design, conduct and interpret preclinical and clinical research to provide key scientific knowledge about our ingredients, and to support the development of new ingredients and solutions. We also contribute to the general understanding of the impact of food policy on public health, much of which we do with academic and industry partners who bring wider expertise and resources to the table.

Our online Nutrition Centre, launched in 2021, provides public access to technical papers, articles on topics such as gut health immunity, as well as helpful videos and infographics.

In line with our purpose pillar of supporting healthy living, we promote nutrition education, and the science underpinning the physiological function and health benefits of our ingredients, in partnership with our customers, health professionals, academic researchers and opinion leaders.

This year, building on our partnership with Nestlé in Latin America to share the latest science on dietary fibre, we launched a new online fibre partnership with the Kellogg’s Nutrition and Health Institute across Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Argentina.