Tate & Lyle Opens Global State-of-the-Art Commercial and Food Innovation Centre Near Chicago, Illinois

New Centre designed to facilitate customer collaboration and to accelerate innovation in specialty food ingredients.

14 June 2012 --- Tate & Lyle, a global provider of ingredients and solutions to the food, beverage and other industries, officially opened its new Commercial and Food Innovation Centre in the Hoffman Estates suburb of Chicago, Illinois.

The 110,000-sq. ft. state-of-the-art facility is designed to facilitate customer collaboration from ‘idea-to-plate’ through the development of new food and beverage products that satisfy consumers’ increasing demand for health, convenience, value and taste, and to significantly accelerate their delivery to market.

The new Centre will act as the cornerstone for Tate & Lyle’s increasing global network of research, food application and technical support laboratories and will serve as the global headquarters of its Innovation and Commercial Development unit.  It also is the North American headquarters of Tate & Lyle’s Speciality Food Ingredients division.

The new Centre includes advanced food science research and processing laboratories, applications and technical services laboratories, a culinary demonstration kitchen, a full suite of consumer insight and sensory testing facilities, pilot plant and prototype manufacturing facilities, and extensive global communications capabilities.

At today’s Grand Opening, customers and other visitors were joined by senior executives and employees from Tate & Lyle for a tour of the facility, culinary demonstrations, sampling of products, and other events.

Speaking at the official opening ceremony, Olivier Rigaud, President, Speciality Food Ingredients said, “Our new Centre demonstrates our commitment to develop distinctive, high-quality speciality food ingredients and solutions for our customers across the world.  The Centre’s state-of–the-art facilities together with our highly skilled and experienced teams of scientists, marketers and product managers, provide a unique combination to help meet our customer’s functional, formulation and nutritional needs, and to accelerate the process of bringing new products to market.”

Karl Kramer, President, Innovation and Commercial Development said, “The new Centre will enable us to collaborate more closely with our customers and deliver the creative solutions they need to stay ahead in today’s fast-paced and evolving global marketplace.”