Tate & Lyle to invest £25 million in venture fund

21 Feb 2005

The move comes as Tate & Lyle focuses increased attention towards higher-value added ingredients.

21/02/05 Tate & Lyle PLC has announced an investment of up to £25 million over a five-year period to set up a wholly-owned venture fund, Tate & Lyle Ventures. The company said that the new venture fund will invest in start-ups and expansion-stage companies that support Tate & Lyle’s strategic growth focus to deliver next-generation food and industrial ingredients.

The move comes as Tate & Lyle focuses increased attention towards higher-value added ingredients. While Mark Robinson at Tate & Lyle told FoodIngredientsFirst that last year it spent a seemingly small budget of £17mln on R & D (compared to a turnover of £3bn), the company made £450mln (15%) of turnover from higher value added ingredients in 2004. Increasing attention to R & D has included bringing in 30 scientists in the last 12 months.

No details of the first investment areas were available as yet, but Robinson noted that their taking over of Allegra Foods Ltd. from the Unilever portfolio indicated that a first step had already been made. Allegra offers an egg replacement from soy, which can make health claims and might be presented as “doing for eggs what margarine did for butter”.

Current development at the company includes a $50mln joint venture with DuPont in DuPont Tate & Lyle BioProducts, LLC. The venture produces the petro-chemical replacer Bio-3G, which is made from corn and is promoted as a more energy efficient product made from renewable resources. Meanwhile Aquasta Astaxanthin is an essential nutrient for farm-raised fish produced by the company’s joint venture with biotech company, Igene Biotechnology, Inc. Other innovation in food ingredients has come for example through the development of xanthan gum, and the company is looking towards developing an entire range of hydrocolloids.

But sucralose is where the company’s real investment is taking place. Tate & Lyle’s reported sales of $113mln for its Splenda brand sucralose in its first six months last September. The company has recently added two new plants and will be opening a new one in Singapore, all in all tripling capacity. “We would not have made an investment of more than $250mln if we weren’t expecting business to grow”, Robinson said.