15 Feb 2025 Profiling: Tate & Lyle’s CEO

Nick Hampton, the head of the modern, low-calorie version of the historic food company Tate & Lyle, heads its quest to create new foodbev ingredients….

A plate of Rich Tea biscuits is prominently placed in the centre of the table as Tate & Lyle chief executive Nick Hampton sits down at its swish London headquarters.

His 104-year-old company’s name may be synonymous with the sugar and Golden Syrup, but Hampton has had a different part to play in creating one of the UK’s favourite dunkers.

Tate & Lyle creates a plethora of ingredients which offer an alternative to that sweet stuff – including extra fibre and sugar replacement in the biscuits.

Hampton’s business has existed in its current form since 2010, when its sugar arm – now known as Tate & Lyle Sugars – was sold off to American Sugar Refining for £211m, while the ingredients business remained listed on the stock market.

In fact, it is the only member of the original FT-30 group of listed companies, created in 1935, still on the London stock market.

“Part of the reason for that is nothing we do today we did more than 30 years ago,” says Hampton of the company, which was formed in 1921 from a merger of two rival sugar refiners. Its origins stretch back even ­further, to a sugar refiner on Liverpool docks in 1859.

Hampton, an executive who spent more than nine years at PepsiCo after a stint at management consultancy Monitor, has been at the helm for nearly seven years. He is continuing to transform the business to provide alternatives to sugar, which is being taxed and blamed in part for the UK’s obesity crisis.

Tate & Lyle describes itself as an expert in sweetening, fortification and “mouthfeel” – a rather off-putting word for what makes up over half the group’s business, which is making things seem crunchy or creamy without high-calorie ingredients.

Related reading: How mouthfeel impacts cultural taste preferences and inspires global innovation

The group sources raw foodstuffs from around the world, and creates ingredients designed to offer crunch or creaminess, add fibre, or a give a sweet taste to foodstuffs without the attendant calories. They originate from the likes of corn, tapioca, seaweed, stevia leaf and citrus peel.

The group’s low- and no-calorie sweeteners and fibre additives have helped remove more than 9m tonnes of sugar from people’s diets since 2020, equivalent to 36 trillion calories, he says.

Tate & Lyle is reformulating gummies – so children can be persuaded to take vitamins without adding sugar or gelatin – and helping make dairy-free ice-cream and crunchy, healthier biscuits…..

The Guardian: Read the full story here