Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the first day of Tate & Lyle's Capital Markets events. It's, of course, lovely to see so many familiar faces in the room, but also to those of you online, thank you for joining us. Sorry you couldn't be with us here today. At least you won't be able to feel the temperature in the room, which we will no doubt find more challenging a bit later. Look, thank you for spending time with us today to learn more about the transformed Tate & Lyle. I hope you enjoy the session, and then the session we're going to have in Denmark for those who are coming over in a couple of days' time. It's actually almost to a day a year ago that we announced the combination with CP Kelco.
Last month, our leadership team got together to reflect on the incredible progress we've made in that last year, and really in six months since we actually closed the transaction. Putting together two big global companies is never easy. Despite that, just over six months into the close of the transaction, we're operating as one unified company. We're serving our customers together and serving them better. Importantly, we're really starting to see the benefits of the combination come through. Over the last six months, I've traveled the four corners of the earth, visiting our teams and talking to customers. The infectious energy within the business is powerful. Every time I walk away from a customer conversation, I feel even more convinced about the growth potential of our business. I hope you see that passion, that energy, that belief in the room today.
Today's primarily about giving you greater insights into the transformed Tate & Lyle, the power of our combination with CP Kelco, and our growth opportunity as we look ahead. We'll also give you more clarity on our existing financial growth framework. I'll come to the agenda in a minute and take you through that. Before I do that, and we get into the meat of the presentation, I just wanted to take a step back and look at the bigger picture that's shaping our future and underpinning our growth potential. As we all know, societies across the world are facing major food and health-related challenges. The incidence of obesity and diabetes is growing massively, with the World Health Organization estimating that 43% of the world's adults are now overweight. Yes, 43%.
The global population is expected to increase by 23% over the next 50 years, not least because people are living longer. That means we're going to have to produce a lot more food than we do today. Those challenges keep on coming. Food systems are having a major impact on our climate, with around a third of all greenhouse gas emissions linked to end-to-end food production and consumption. 23% of that, sorry, 20% plus of that comes from agriculture alone, which also represents around 70% of all of the water used in the world today. For the food industry, these challenges are being exacerbated by trends such as the rise of anti-obesity medicine, the debate around ultra-processed foods, changes in food regulation and labeling, and worryingly, an increase in misinformation, particularly on social media, which is eroding trust in sound science.
With all this complexity, what is clear is that governments and consumers across the world increasingly want food companies to provide healthier and more nutritious food and drink. Just look at the U.K. government's announcements over the weekend. They also want food to be more sustainable, to be more affordable, to know where it comes from, and to have simpler or cleaner labels. At the same time, they will not compromise on taste and also want food that meets the demands of their busy lifestyles. Food companies, our customers, are facing unprecedented challenges to navigate this increasingly complex world. I should know I worked in the food industry for over 30 years, 20 years as a customer of Tate & Lyle. I believe the food industry is at an inflection point.
To meet the health and dietary challenges the world is facing, a significant proportion of the food and drink we consume today will need to be reformulated to improve nutrition through removing sugar, fat, and calories, and adding essential nutrients such as fiber and protein. This will be required whether someone is young or old, thin or overweight. The need for healthier, affordable, and more nutritious food at scale is universal. That is why over the last seven years, we have intentionally and systematically repositioned Tate & Lyle to be right at the center of the future of food, with the portfolio and the capabilities and the global reach to meet our customers, consumers, and society's demand for healthier, more nutritious, and sustainable food and drink.
Today, Tate & Lyle is a global leader in reformulation, an expert in taking sugar, calories, and fat out of food and drink and adding fiber and protein. Our combination with CP Kelco has significantly increased and strengthened our customer offering, particularly through their expertise in mouthfeel. As we will show you today, mouthfeel is the key unlock to nutritionally improving food and maintaining great taste. If food does not taste good, no one is going to eat it. The new Tate & Lyle is a purpose-led, science-driven, and customer-focused business, with the portfolio and the capabilities to help solve food challenges of today and tomorrow. Let's look at how we live that purpose.
What does it mean to transform lives through the science of food? We all know that food does more than just keep us healthy. It's the key to living better. As our world evolves, our needs and tastes do too. With change comes ever more complex challenges. The opportunities of tomorrow require world-leading expertise today. At Tate & Lyle, we're driving the science of food further, led by even deeper understanding, empowered by even broader capabilities. We're harnessing the possibility of science and the power of nature to bring out the best in food. Whether you need to create food that's tastier, healthier, or more sustainable, whether your ambitions demand innovation, application, or something altogether more end-to-end, your challenge is our challenge. Our unrivaled expertise in mouthfeel, sweetening, and fortification makes us the partner of choice for the opportunities that matter most.
It all comes back to the heart of what we do: science, solutions, and society. Forever learning, forever innovating, forever growing, so we can help our customers do the same and continue to shape the future of food together.
This is a totally different Tate & Lyle to the company I joined 11 years ago. With that in mind, I want to leave you with four clear messages about the business today. Firstly, following the combination with CP Kelco, the structural transformation of Tate & Lyle into a specialty solutions business is now complete. Secondly, with our leading positions across sweetening, mouthfeel, and fortification, we are well placed to meet growing global demand for healthier, more nutritious food and drink. Thirdly, our unique portfolio and enhanced capabilities significantly increase our ability to be the solutions partner of choice for customers. Lastly, we have a clear strategy for accelerating growth and delivering attractive shareholder returns. We have three objectives for today's event. Firstly, to give you some more insight into the transformed Tate & Lyle.
Importantly, with a deeper look at the CP Kelco business and the power of the combination. Secondly, to set out what makes us different, what gives us a competitive edge in the market, with a particular focus on the importance of mouthfeel. Thirdly, how are we going to deliver on our focus of accelerating growth through customer solutions, addressing key societal trends, and driving science and innovation. Let's start by talking briefly about the transformed Tate & Lyle. Since 2018, we have taken a number of concrete steps to reposition Tate & Lyle as a growth-focused specialty food and beverage solutions business. We've transformed the way we focus on customers and on the categories where we can have most impact and deliver most growth.
have accelerated investment in R&D to establish world-class scientific capabilities and in the commercial capabilities and infrastructure across key markets to serve our customers better globally. We have reshaped our portfolio to focus on specialty food and beverage solutions through strategic acquisitions and selling our commodity business premiums. Finally, we have combined with CP Kelco, one of the most admired and well-respected businesses in the ingredients industry. Following this combination, the structural transformation into a specialty solutions provider is complete, and the business is well positioned to accelerate growth. Over the last five years, through this transformation, we have created a GBP 2.1 billion revenue specialty business with an attractive pro forma EBITDA margin of 21%. This margin profile benchmarks well to our specialty ingredients peers. Looking forward, our ambition is to accelerate top-line growth and, underpinned by operational leverage, deliver stronger EBITDA and earnings per share progression.
A key driver of our margin progression has been the leading market positions we have built in each of our three key platforms. In sweetening, through our toolbox of ingredients and solutions and over a century of scientific know-how, we are the market leader in sugar and calorie reduction. Mouthfeel is a critical area of the food matrix. Following the combination with CP Kelco, our range of pectins, clean-label starches, and specialty gums are unrivaled in our industry. Our third platform of fortification is based mainly around our leadership position in soluble dietary fiber, with a smaller offering in plant proteins. The strategic focus of our transformed business is simple and clear. Based on our market-leading positions and unique scientific and solutions capabilities, we are a leading and differentiated specialty food and beverage solutions business, delivering sweetening, mouthfeel, and fortification across our four key categories.
Throughout our transformation, we have successfully delivered our strategy through our strategic growth framework. This is based on four pillars: accelerating innovation, portfolio expansion, integrated solutions, and market focus, with serving our customers at the core. This framework is supported by our scientific and technical know-how, solutions capability, our increasingly resilient global supply chain, the talent of our people, and our culture. CP Kelco is the perfect fit with our strategy and strengthens each of these four pillars. It brings unique technical and solutions capabilities and a high-quality portfolio operating within our existing addressable market. As we will explain more later, it takes us from having two to seven of the main mouthfeel ingredients used in food and beverage applications, the broadest of any player in the market, and expands our presence in faster-growing markets.
At its core, Tate & Lyle remains a purpose-driven business, committed to transforming lives through the science of food. It's been clear from day one that our new colleagues from CP Kelco share our sense of purpose and are committed to delivering growth and positive social impact. The figures speak for themselves. Over the last five years, through our sweeteners and fibers, we have removed over 40 trillion calories from people's diets. That's more than the recommended daily intake of the entire global population. We've also donated 4.6 million meals to food banks and other charitable partners to support people in need. Through our award-winning regenerative agriculture schemes, we've reduced our Scope 3 forest, land, and agriculture greenhouse gas emissions by an impressive 31%. Remember, two-thirds of the climate impact of food comes from agriculture.
In summary, the transformed Tate & Lyle is now a global, high-margin specialty business with a clear focus on accelerating growth. It's also a highly cash-generative business with a strong balance sheet, providing the flexibility to invest in future growth and deliver attractive shareholder returns. Moving next to what makes us different. For me, it's a combination of three key reasons. Firstly, we have the broadest ingredients portfolio and solutions toolbox across our three platforms. Secondly, our unique capabilities to formulate across our three platforms provide us the opportunity to give customers the solutions they need. Thirdly, our unrivaled scientific and technical expertise allow us to invent and create new opportunities for growth. Let me take each one of those in turn. In each of our three platforms, we now have a market-leading position.
In total, we have over 1,000 different sweeteners, starches, pectins, specialty gums, and dietary fibers, all with their own functional attributes or nutritional benefits. We formulate these ingredients into solutions which solve a huge range of customer challenges, including sugar and calorie reduction, sugar replacement, thickening, gelling, and added nutrition. Each of these platforms has large addressable markets totaling over $20 billion. This slide shows the breadth of offering in each platform. As you can see, the sweetening and mouthfeel platforms are already sizable and have significant growth potential given the food trends we see. Whilst comparatively small today, the fortification platform also has significant growth potential, particularly given increasing awareness of the importance of fiber in diets, which we will talk about more later. The second reason why we are different is our ability to formulate across the intersection of sweetening, mouthfeel, and fortification.
Reformulation sounds so simple, but it is far more complicated than just swapping one ingredient for another. Taste, texture, mouthfeel, shelf stability—all these must be taken into account when reformulating food and drink. Taste is also inherently local, which means that food and drink also needs to adapt to local preferences. It is our ability to formulate across all three platforms in local markets, which gives us a unique proposition for our customers. In mouthfeel, as I have said, our capability is significantly enhanced by CP Kelco. For example, our food starches are very effective at providing bulk, but when used on their own, they can sometimes result in a texture that is too gelatinous. Now, with CP Kelco's products, we can modify the viscosity and texture of foods without significantly altering the taste.
By combining these ingredients, we can create a significantly enhanced mouthfeel experience, whether to support the sensory appeal of a product or to deliver improved nutrition. We can also create textures that are suitable for specific dietary needs, such as gluten-free baking. The third reason is our scientific and technical expertise, which is now unrivaled in our industry. By combining our expertise in areas such as bioconversion, fractionation, and separation science with CP Kelco's expertise in biofermentation and extraction, we are opening up new opportunities to develop the next generation of ingredients and solutions and increased interest from customers. The broadest portfolio across our three platforms, our unique ability to formulate across those platforms, and our unrivaled scientific and technical expertise—that is what makes us different. That is what gives us an edge with our customers.
For me, there's also another reason why we have an edge, and that's our experienced and performance-focused management team. A team with belief in the potential of our business, which you'll see today, a desire to accelerate growth, and the desire to make a positive impact on the world we live in. This is a team that is truly purpose-led, with deep customer knowledge, extensive industry experience, and a real belief and commitment to delivering our growth strategy. Together, the team has more than 200 years of combined experience in the food industry. It's also a gender-balanced team, a strong signal to the organization that we want a truly inclusive workforce and culture. The leadership team includes two members from the CP Kelco team, Didier and Jérôme, both of whom are here today, as are five other members of our executive team.
I'm also delighted to announce today that Melissa Law, who has run our global supply chain for the last seven years, including our highly successful productivity program, is taking on the position of Chief Commercial and Transformation Officer. I'm also pleased that Kim Faulkner, an executive from Colgate-Palmolive with nearly 30 years of manufacturing and supply chain experience, will be joining us in August to become our new Chief Supply Chain Officer. Kim will be a great addition to our team. Moving to the third objective for today, which is demonstrating our ability to accelerate growth. I want to start by reminding you of our financial algorithm over the medium term.
Given the significant benefits of the combination with CP Kelco, on average per year, we continue to expect the enlarged Tate & Lyle will deliver revenue growth towards the higher end of our 4%-6% range, EBITDA growth ahead of revenue supported by stronger operational leverage and the benefits of cost synergies in the 2027 financial year. Earnings per share growth ahead of EBITDA and with strong cash generation and supported by a strong balance sheet, the ability to invest in further growth. Let me explain why I believe we are well placed to deliver this algorithm. Firstly, we operate in a large and attractive market. The global specialty food ingredients market is around $70 billion and is expected to grow in value by around 2% on a compound annual basis over the next three years.
$20 billion of this market is addressable by Tate & Lyle's three platforms and is expected to grow ahead of the wider market at 3%. Drilling down a bit further, 70% of our addressable market sits in our four core categories of beverages, dairy, soups, sauces and dressings, and bakery and snacks. These categories, on average, are expected to grow between 2%-4% over the next three years. With our expanded portfolio and enhanced capabilities, we are ideally positioned to benefit from these growth opportunities. The other 30% is in categories such as confectionery and infant nutrition, where we have regional expertise and which also offer good growth opportunities. It's also worth remembering that while the global specialty ingredients sweetener market is around $6 billion, sugar still makes up around 80% of the global sweetening market.
There is an estimated further $3 billion of sugar replacement opportunity across our four core categories in addition to the $20 billion addressable market. What gives us confidence that we can grow ahead of the overall market from the 2027 financial year? It is based on three main factors. Firstly, how we have repositioned the portfolio to benefit from growing food industry trends. Secondly, the delivery of the benefits of the CP Kelco combination. Thirdly, continued progress in mixed price and solution selling. Let's look at the market penetration opportunities we believe will drive an acceleration in top-line growth because of the way we have repositioned our portfolio. Firstly, there are the societal trends I talked about earlier, including population growth, heightened awareness of the link between diet and health, and the continued need for convenience, which all offer growth opportunities.
Secondly, food industry trends offer significant market penetration opportunities. As I mentioned earlier, probably the biggest is the opportunity to reformulate ultra-processed food to improve its nutritional content. Other areas which, of course, are interrelated include increasing demand for sugar and calorie reduction, fiber and protein fortification, cleaner labels, and cost optimization. We expect to benefit disproportionately from these trends given the repositioning of our business. The third driver of accelerated growth is delivering on the power of the CP Kelco combination. This includes leveraging our expanded portfolio and enhanced technical capabilities with both existing and new customers, particularly from our leadership in mouthfeel, also benefiting from our increased presence in the faster-growing markets of Asia, Middle East and Africa, and Latin America, and, of course, delivering on our targeted revenue synergies.
All the presentations you will see today will address these market penetration opportunities in more detail and our ability to accelerate growth. The agenda for today's event is on the screen. I will shortly hand over to Didier Viala, who will give you a deeper dive on the CP Kelco business, followed by Bill Magee, who will talk about the power of the combination. We will then have a short break, after which our mouthfeel, solutions, nutrition, and science and innovation teams will talk about how we are working with customers to accelerate growth. We will finish with Sarah , our CFO, bringing it all together in our financial framework before I will return to summarize before a Q&A session. With that, let me hand over to Didier, who is our Chief Solutions Development Officer. Before that, the President of CP Kelco.
He is already making a huge, huge difference to the way we are managing our three platforms. I am delighted to have him on our team. Didier, over to you. Thank you.
Thank you, Nick. I am very, very pleased to be here today and to have the opportunity to speak to you about CP Kelco, a company I led for eight years, which I am very passionate about and proud of, actually. A little bit about myself. I am French, as I am sure you can tell, but I spent most of my career working around the globe and most recently in the U.S., where I am based today. I am an engineer by training, as I graduated in food technology and chemical engineering. I spent more than 30 years in CP Kelco, having several leadership positions, including innovation, marketing, business development, global operations, or sales.
I was President of CP Kelco from 2017. Along with the leadership team at CP Kelco, we recognized a while ago that we needed a strong partner to take the business to the next level. For us, it was very clear that Tate & Lyle would be a perfect partner. We knew that the commercial, operational, or cultural fit was extremely strong. Obviously, while it's still early days, and we have so much more we can do to realize the potential from the combination, from the way customers are engaging that I see every time I meet with them, from the way our two teams are working together, I know we made the right decision.
My plan for today is to give you a few more details on CP Kelco and then hand over to my colleague, Bill Magee, who will talk about the power of the combination. If I had to explain CP Kelco in three words, I would use science, customer, and nature. If we start with science, CP Kelco is a little bit of a nerdy business, if you see what I mean. Our products are complex to make, and they require a lot of technical expertise to use. At CP Kelco, we really love to solve technical problems. We enjoy innovating and finding new ways of doing things. Science and the pursuit of technical excellence is deep in our DNA. The second one is customer. Customer obsession is part of CP Kelco's mark of fabric.
Customers is what we think about when we come to work in the morning, and customers is what we think about at the end of the day when we go back home. That is the combination of strong technical expertise and customer intimacy, which gives CP Kelco its unique proposition for customers. The last one is science. We are obsessed by using technology to unleash the power of nature. We are a nature-derived business. For that reason, environmental sustainability is core to our business, as it is for Tate & Lyle, and yet another reason for such a strong fit. Let me now introduce you to CP Kelco and give you an overview. CP Kelco is made of the combination of two businesses: Kelco, which was founded in 1929 in San Diego, California, and CP Copenhagen Pectin, which was founded in 1934 in Denmark.
Both businesses merged to create the CP Kelco company in the year 2000. What you can see is that together with Tate & Lyle, we are more than 250 years of combined industry experience. Before the combination with Tate & Lyle, CP Kelco had always been a privately held business. As such, we may not have been known outside of the food industry. Within the industry, we were well established, and I believe we're respected for more than 90 years. During that time, we partnered with many ingredients companies, actually including Tate & Lyle for the past 10 years, on innovation projects. From that collaboration on innovation, we knew that Tate & Lyle was the right partner for us. We are a global business operating seven manufacturing sites in the U.S., Denmark, Germany, Brazil, and China. Our business model is to service customers locally.
We do that using nine regional innovation labs and two global innovation centers in Atlanta, U.S., and Copenhagen, Denmark. All those sites have been very well maintained, funded, and invested on, following an investment program, capital investment program, of about $400 million for the past few years. For those of you who will visit Denmark, our site on Thursday, you will see that our employees are actually very engaged, excited about the combination, and not only focusing on servicing our customers, but looking after their trousers and the planet we live on through our sustainability programs. At CP Kelco, we are creating and manufacturing products using two very distinct technologies. Pectin, carrageenan, locust bean gum, citrus fibers are produced by extraction from natural resources in our plants in Brazil, Denmark, and Germany.
The specialty bio-gums products, such as gellan gum or dairy tang gum, are manufactured using microbial fermentation in San Diego, California, U.S., Oklahoma, U.S., or Wuliang in China. If I now look at our business, it's very well balanced, very well balanced geographically, where we do have one-third of the business coming from the Americas, one-third of the business coming from Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and one-third coming from Asia-Pacific. If you look at the technology platforms to the right, you can see that about a little bit more, 54% of our business is coming from extracted products, while the other half is coming from fermented products. Very well balanced platforms as well. Now, this slide will show the breakdown of the revenue for last fiscal year by products, by industry, or by categories.
To start to the left, you see that our main product is pectin. We are a clear market leader in pectins, with about 46% of the sales. Most of our sales are in food and beverage products, 77%. The rest, the balance, about 23%, is done in non-food categories. Those are primarily specialty bio-gums, which are used to replace petrochemicals in consumer care or household applications. To the right, if we segment down the main food and beverage sales in categories, you see that about 40% is made into beverages, 24% in dairy, and then going down into soups, sauces, and dressings. Our products do provide very specific functionalities. They are used in many different ways, always to meet growing consumer demands for healthier, more nutritious, more sustainable products.
Pectin is always the ingredient of choice for clean label, consumer-friendly products, while specialty bio-gums like gellan gum will be used to tackle suspension, thickening, stabilization, gelling problems into formulations. For example, if you take jams or confectionery products, pectins will be used to provide the right gel texture. Pectin can also be used into drinking yogurts to protect the proteins and making sure you got a very smooth mouthfeel and not the chalky ones, which you will reject. Gellan gum, for example, is used a lot to suspend fruit pulp or calcium into beverages. It can be used to keep soy milk or oat milk separated so that it's evenly distributed into the bottle. All that without having a very thick or rich mouthfeel, which you will not like in a drink. Very unique functionality.
If we look at our positions on the market, and we worked over the years in building market-leading positions on all of them, we are clear market leaders, as I said, for pectin, for gellan gum, dairy tang gums, or locust bean gum. We are enjoying leading positions as well on carrageenans for dairy and desserts applications. What I want to highlight is that about 80% of our sales are actually coming from products where we enjoy a market-leading position. When you look at that portfolio, together with the offering from Tate & Lyle and the very, very rich portfolio they have in starches, for example, we are the only company on the market that can now offer mouthfeel solutions for customers having proprietary hydrocolloids, gums, and starches in our portfolio. As you can expect, raw materials are also key to our products being natural resources.
Pectins are extracted from citrus peel, and we use mostly orange peel, but also lemon and lime peel. We are the only pectin producer which is integrated into the raw material. We are enjoying a very, very competitive position in Brazil, where we are located in the São Paulo citrus belt, where we are actually processing pectin from wet oranges or drying using patented process to ship it to Denmark and Germany plants. We are a very, very diverse supplier base. We've been working with them for a long time. That's very, very important to have a stable supply and quality supply for pectin. If I look at bio-gums, before going on the other resources, it's made out of glucose syrup, and the volume we're taking are negligible in the industry. No real strategic raw material there.
The other one would be seaweeds, where we're using cold-water seaweeds from Chile mostly, or warm-water seaweeds from Zanzibar in Africa. Again, we are integrated into there. Sustainability for those strategic raw materials is paramount. A couple of examples in Brazil, which is a great example of product circularity for pectin and peel. We are also using biomass to produce steam and therefore limit our CO2 emissions. While for carrageenan and seaweeds in Zanzibar, our operations there are already B Corp certified, showing the importance we have for sustainable farming or community involvement. You heard me talking about customer obsessions. If we had a customer here today, I'm sure that they will tell you that CP Kelco is different. It's different because of our product quality, technical knowledge, and service, and customer service overall. Let's hear from them.
We asked four customers in Asia to actually do a video as a testimonial for CP Kelco.
We have been using pectins from CP Kelco for at least the last 60 years. We're extremely satisfied with the pectin solutions that CP Kelco has provided to us and the services that they have been giving us for the last many years. We really can thank Lian Ying Ng Lydia and CP Kelco as a specific team for their full support in providing the high-quality and consistent technical support to us. [Foreign language].
To me, that's extremely gratifying to hear about those executives. I know that they are excited about the combinations. I hope that you have some more insight into CP Kelco and the business. For those of you that will be visiting Lille Skensved in Denmark on Thursday, you will see, but also taste a little bit more.
Now I will call Bill Magee to the stage to talk about the power of the combination. Thank you.
Thank you, Didier. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Bill Magee, and I'm President of our Americas business. I've been with Tate & Lyle a little over seven years now. Before that, I spent a good portion of my career at companies like Monsanto, Rohm and Haas, and Dow running businesses that made ingredients for food packaging. What I often say is I've moved from being wrapped around the food to now being inside the food. I'm actually a lot less annoying at the grocery store now because I do not have to destroy things to figure out if my ingredients are inside. I can just read the back of the package.
If it's something interesting, I can snap a photo and maybe even send it to somebody around the world about a possible customer opportunity. I'm here today excited about the combination with CP Kelco because of the journey that we're now on with our customers. I'm incredibly proud of the passion that I see in our combined teams around the world to both seek and solve our customers' toughest challenges. After all, it is our customers who are working to redefine food and make it better for the future, and they need our help. Together with CP Kelco, this combined business can do more for those customers. We can solve tougher challenges. We're not just a different partner, but we're a better partner. One of the reasons that the combination of these two businesses is so powerful is the complementary nature of these businesses.
Almost 80% of CP Kelco's revenue is in the mouthfeel platform. You are going to hear more about that today from our experts who will join us after the break. 90% of CP Kelco's food-derived revenue is in Tate & Lyle's already core categories of beverage, dairy, soups, sauces, and dressings, and bakeries and snacks. Almost half of the business is in growing parts of the world like Latin America, Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific. This combination makes us more powerful from a platform perspective, from a category perspective, and from a geographic perspective. Another part of this combination that is powerful is it increases our access to our customers around the world, which will allow us to accelerate top-line growth. Almost 60% of CP Kelco's revenue is derived through distribution partners. What does that mean?
It means that there's a third party in between us and the customer. And a third of CP Kelco's direct customers are new customers to Tate & Lyle. So almost about three-quarters of this business, there's a real opportunity for us to build intimacy and relationships with those customers directly to, again, seek and solve their toughest challenges, which will enable us to accelerate top-line growth. Now, it's early days, but we're already seeing examples of this around the world. For example, in the U.S., at a large dairy customer where, as Tate & Lyle, we had struggled for a number of years to develop the right relationship and business with this customer. But CP Kelco, on the other hand, had really developed a nice relationship and a meaningful piece of business.
We're facing that customer now as the new Tate & Lyle, leveraging that relationship that was built, but deploying an expanded set of capabilities and products. We will be able to cross-sell and grow with that customer very quickly. We're also deploying energized promotional material around the world to make sure that we can engage more with our customers, from updated marketing campaigns to reinvigorated customer workshops and innovation days that we do at our customer locations. We're having a lot of engagement on those very early on in the process. One of the reasons for that high level of engagement is that we have built a leadership position in mouthfeel. Our mouthfeel team will be with you later on this afternoon to go through the detail.
What I can tell you is, in my initial conversations with customers, there's a lot of very early engagement in this area. Literally, since the first day we announced we were combining these two businesses, customers have been asking us to come talk to them about what we can do together by bringing these portfolios into one business. A couple of weeks ago, I sat together with Jérôme Béra and Remington Zhu, talked about some of the great things that our teams around the world are doing with our customers. I'd like to share with you what we've talked about.
Bill, Jérôme, Remington, thank you for joining me to discuss the Tate & Lyle CP Kelco combination. I'd like to start by asking you each, what excites you about the combination?
Yeah, I've been talking a lot about the expanded portfolio of products and the different way we're showing up with our customers. We'll probably talk a bit more about that here today. I still believe that. What I've been thinking about today is the power of bringing our teams together. We just brought the Americas team together in Miami a couple of weeks ago. You start seeing how we all bring a different sort of value to the customer conversation. Jérôme and I were talking earlier. I was thinking about, what have I seen? What were CP Kelco people doing that we did not do as well? I think about technical onsite with the customer, solving problems in their manufacturing operation. I'm seeing some unique things there.
I think you were saying that you might see some same things coming from what we're Tate & Lyle expertise. Maybe you'd like to share that. No, absolutely. I think the power of the combination, the excitement coming from the combination of the two businesses, first of all, gives us scale. I think we did not have certainly at CP Kelco, and I think even Tate & Lyle was lacking scale, so to speak. Scale, not only in terms of the breadth of the portfolio we now have, but will allow us to solve a broader set of customers' challenges and innovation needs going forward. It is also kind of the breadth of the capabilities that the two organizations coming together unlock for our customers. Same impact, I think. Bill and Jérôme have mentioned that we have got a bigger portfolios. We have better capabilities.
There's another thing is we've got a bigger customer base, right? In some of the countries, because APAC got wider geography coverage, right? We got Japan, South Korea, Greater China, ASEAN, India, Indonesia, and there's a lot of countries there. In some markets, actually, the combination of the two companies brings much better customer-based coverage. How does the combination enhance what we can do with customers? What can we do today that we couldn't do prior to the combination? Clearly, again, coming from CP Kelco, clearly we have a different portfolio and probably different level of capabilities, I will say. By capabilities, I mean really end-to-end, starting with consumer insights, where I think there's really strong, solid expertise, legacy Tate & Lyle on that, and linking those consumer insights all the way kind of to customers' briefs, challenges, formulation, innovation needs.
I think that's something we could not do on our own at CP Kelco, clearly not. Adding to that, sensory expertise, regulatory affairs, nutrition, kind of nutrition science expertise as well. Really a clearly enhanced set of capabilities. I think another new and enhanced capability for the combined organization is the category model we deploy in region at scale. By category, it's really allowing us to speak the language of the customers in a more meaningful manner for them and their teams as well. I think that's really a large unlock, I think, for the combination. Especially around mouthfeel, claiming mouthfeel leadership and demonstrating that to our customers, that enhanced set of capabilities will clearly make us a stronger partner for our customers too. Maybe to bring it to life with maybe an actual customer example.
I'll start with general and maybe get more specific, right? Before the combination, our food scientists at Tate & Lyle would formulate with pectin, right? For sure, right? Because we know the functionality of the ingredient. But we didn't have the integrated all the way back to the fruit expertise to optimize how we would deploy that in the solution, right? In the last few months, we've had a major consumer products company, one of our largest customers. We had an Innovation Day event. We've done these before, but we were able to do it in a different way. You bring 100 scientists at your customer together, and you bring them prototypes, and you show them things that you can do, right? We had brought a prototype, this most recent one that was a gelatin-free marshmallow, for example, which is kind of hard to do, actually.
The customer was quite surprised about the type of texture and mouthfeel they were seeing in that. It sparked an interest for them to do something that maybe they thought was either impossible or harder to do in partnership with us. I'd say that's different, right? It's deploying the same model we've used, but with more tools, more expertise, more capabilities. Correct. Yeah, similarly, I think talking about mouthfeel, Tate & Lyle used to only talk many times about starch. Now we've got more tools and more products to talk about with our customers. We even can come up with some entrepreneurial solutions to our customers. For example, in the FIC back in March, usually when we do the prototypes of beverage, we mainly talk about sugar reductions, right? The sweeteners, stevia, et cetera, et cetera. Now we're talking about coffee with gellan gum, right?
There's a combination of sugar reduction plus the mouthfeels, which has really created a wow to our customers. Then running the FIC, some customers just show strong interest, and we follow up, and then there's a potential business pipeline coming. That really opened up more doors for us and more entrepreneurial solutions, which customers really, really want. Actually, it surprised me a bit, if I'm honest. We saw our customers pulling us into a combined conversation, literally from the first day. I think what that says is they understand the logic of what we're trying to do and the strategy and how we can help them. They're pulling us into those conversations early, right? Another example, right? A customer that we had already been working with as Tate & Lyle was putting together a protein shake, right? They were asking us to do something.
We just could not do it, right? Right after the combination, we were able to pull in some experts from Jérôme's team or from somewhere else within what was CP Kelco, and we were actually able to address the problem, right? You see that that creates the credibility in that customer organization that the next problem they have, we are going to be the preferred place they go to, right? I think you really start to see that accelerating now as we deploy one face to customer. It is going to go even faster. Yeah, to build on that, same thing. I had the privilege to meet different customers in the MER region, kind of regional players, larger CPG global players as well. I think the feedback has been very consistent. They clearly understand the rationale for the combination. Our portfolios are very complementary. They see that.
The challenge is on us now to show them, let's make it happen. I just want to add on one thing that I would be remiss if I did not mention, because we have talked about it a lot. We have had customers come to us now and say, wow, I am excited I can now work directly with your technical experts, because our customer models between the two companies are different. We are moving now with the scale that we are able to have across the world and across my region to be able to have those really one-to-one conversations with customers. We have had very early requests to say, okay, there has always been this kind of third-party wall between me, the customer, and the technical experts. Now I can have those conversations directly, because then I believe that can help me to move faster and you partner with us.
We've seen a lot of requests very early for those direct connections. What sorts of projects are we seeing in the pipeline? Are there any specific customer wins that you can paint a picture of for us today? We have some wins, cross-selling wins. Within APAC, we have some internal competitions to get the first cross-selling orders. The India team stands out. They got the first order. One legacy customer, CPG customers, bought sweeteners and sold that to the nutrition customers. That stands out. Other customers are following. In Vietnam, we also see some customers use our sweeteners in coconut juice, which used to be the legacy CPG customers. We see that start to come. Though it's a bit small here and there, we see the momentum and the teams are excited.
Yeah, just to build on that, I think that's what we're tracking, those engagements. We're having different conversations with customers. I know in India, we've got more than 60 projects that were created since the combination and engaging with customers, one unified commercial and tech service team. Really, the pipeline is building up, which will pay off. The typical development cycle in the food and beverage industry is like 12-18 months, depending on the geographies we're operating to. These will pay off.
We had customers reaching out proactively, customers we knew as one example in Europe, a health and wellness, very focused beverage company in Europe trying to develop a cleaner label on expanding their range for functional beverages and clearly having citrus fiber coming from the legacy CP Kelco portfolio to complement some of our sweeteners, offering we are already selling to that customer, just generated a new project for the team. We have, yeah, early signs of that combination really, really going to pay off for our customers. There are two areas that come to mind for me when you ask that question. I am seeing in the Americas a lot of opportunity in the dairy space, which is a core category for both of our organizations. It is an area where the challenge of mouthfeel really tends to come to life.
Our toolbox is almost ideal to address some of those challenges, whether it be ice cream, whether it be drinkable yogurt. We are seeing quite an interesting pipeline of opportunities come to life there. Another area would be in the nutritional gummy space, right? I think in the U.S. right now, everybody seems to want everything in a gummy, but they also want it to be low or no sugar. They want it to taste good, feel good, have the right texture in the mouth. That is much harder to do than you might think it is. Our toolbox is really ideally suited to address those challenges right now. There really is an opportunity to leverage each other's work across the regions here, right?
This is where kind of our networked global collaboration centers with customers connected to the center around sharing best practices, sharing when we build a particular technical solution that could be deployed broadly and customized in the region. A place like gummies, we can leverage across the world as well. How are we encouraging our teams, in particular our commercial teams, to work together as one team now that we have come together? I think, yeah, we have been encouraging them to work together since, what, six months ago when we closed on the transaction. We worked on standing up one commercial team in each region that became effective April 1st. Again, that encouragement was not needed, quite frankly. Our people were curious to learn from day one, what are you doing with that customer on your side of the portfolio, et cetera.
That positive build was there from day one.
I hope you can see the excitement that the three of us share around the work that our teams are doing with our customers around the world. I can tell you that excitement comes from two places: the energy and passion that we see from our people working together on the ground, and some of those direct interactions with meaningful customers who are really, you really start to see what the future begins to look like as we bring these two businesses together. In summary, we have created a business with this combination that is stronger from a platform perspective in our core categories and has access to faster-growing markets around the world. We have increased our customer access, and we have built a leadership position in mouthfeel.
That's why we're confident that, as Nick said, we can grow this business ahead of the market in the medium term. Now, before we bring in our mouthfeel experts, we're going to give you a short break. For those of you online, we'll see you in about 15 minutes. For those of you in the room, we have tea and coffee in the back of the room. We actually have some consumer products set up that contain our ingredients. I encourage you to take a look. We have two separate sections of prototype demonstrations where you can touch and feel and taste some food that our ingredients are a part of. I hope you enjoy it, and we'll see you back here in a few minutes.
Ladies and gentlemen, can I ask you to move back to begin the second part, please? Perfect.
Welcome back for the second half. It's me, Mr. Instructions, again. You've got some enticing, intriguing cakes on your tables. Please don't touch them. They're part of the next session. When we want you to eat them and experience them, we will. Enjoy the second half. I'm now going to hand over to Dr. John Stewart [audio distortion] . John.
I'm going to talk about one of the most important areas in food, which is mouthfeel. My name is Dr. John Stewart, and I lead our mouthfeel platform. I started with Tate & Lyle in 2010, but I started my career in academia as a neuroscientist, studying sensations and perceptions and how we experience the world around us.
At Tate & Lyle, I've worked in innovation, strategy, M&A, but mostly in commercial roles, working closely with our customers to really understand what it is that they need, what they value, and how we here at Tate & Lyle can help our customers to be successful. I have three key messages I'd like to share with you today. One is that mouthfeel is at the center of food and drink formulation. For formulation to be successful, you have to get the mouthfeel just right. Second, the combination of Tate & Lyle and CP Kelco creates a leadership position in mouthfeel. Third, our unique portfolio and technical expertise, particularly in mouthfeel, is really accelerating the solutions that we develop for our customers. Let's start right at the beginning. What is mouthfeel?
From the earliest age, we have a very primal response to foods, to eating. Very early in life, we start to develop individual preferences for one food over another: foods we like, foods we dislike. What makes us prefer one food over the other? Very often, this is down to the mouthfeel, so the way that the food feels in the mouth when you're eating, that texture and sensation you experience when you're eating foods and drinking drinks. Mouthfeel is more than just texture. Our perceptions of mouthfeel can be influenced by things like the appearance of the food or even the sound the food makes in the mouth while eating. Think of a food that you really like. Think of your favorite food. We'll do this together. Imagine your favorite food and think that you're eating it right now.
Just imagine that you're having that food. What is it that you like about that food? Is it the way that the food feels in your mouth when you're eating it? Is it crispy or crunchy? Is it creamy or smooth? Is it light or airy? That is mouthfeel. Now, think of a food that you dislike, a food that you would normally avoid. Again, what is it that you dislike about the food? Is it the way that it feels in your mouth when you're eating? Is it dry or chalky? Is it lumpy or gristly? Is it watery or slimy? For me, that's mashed potato, by the way. I really don't like the mouthfeel for mashed potato, so I always avoid mashed potato. Our customers know that creating the experiences that consumers love is key to a successful product.
It's the difference between a product that's successful and one which fails. They know that they have to get the mouthfeel right. We all know what mouthfeel is instinctively. We've known it all our lives. Often, we don't realize how important it is and how we enjoy and experience foods. Mouthfeel is also important for some of the big societal challenges that we face today. As the world looks to nutritionally rebalance food at scale, mouthfeel becomes a critical unlock to making that happen. That's why the growth opportunity is so large. The market for addressable mouthfeel ingredients is estimated at $11 billion. Let's look at some facts. Taste is absolutely king when it comes to food, with 85% of consumers saying that taste is the number one driver of a food product choice.
We know that mouthfeel is a key component of that overall taste experience. It is no surprise then we see this reflected in product launches, with one in four new product launches last year in food and beverage with a specific texture claim on pack. Our customers know that getting mouthfeel right in the formulation is absolutely key to achieving consumer satisfaction, to product purchase and repurchase. Reformulation is complex. People often ask, you know, if you want to make food healthier, why do you not just put in less fat and sugar to begin with? Of course, that is the challenge, because ingredients like sugar and fat, they play a key role in food in terms of structure and function. If you take these out, what you are left with, it may well be healthier, but it will not be very appealing.
The mouthfeel will not be good. As consumers, we're all less likely to choose those products and much more likely to choose an unhealthy option, whether we admit it or not. Mouthfeel is critical to delivering a successful reformulation. We want to make food healthier, more convenient, more affordable, and using ingredients that we can all recognize to clean label. We do this today. We work with our customers to take out sugar, fat, and calories, and we add in nutrients like fiber and protein. When doing that reformulation, it's key that the mouthfeel is right. If you get the mouthfeel wrong, the reformulation falls apart. We're going to show you what we mean with the help of my colleague, Will Ballantyne. Will is a food scientist at our application center in Mould here in the U.K.
I'm going to ask Will to come to the stage and talk us through the demo. Over to you, Will.
Hello. As John said, my name's Will Ballantyne. I'm a Technical Services Director for the bakery and nutrition category team here in Europe. This is the interactive part now. If you would like to each take one A sample and one B sample, the trays in front of you on the table are all labeled. There's enough for everybody just to take one A and one B. I will introduce them once everybody's got. Yeah. Yeah. Just to make everybody aware as well, if you do have any allergies, these samples contain wheat, gluten, egg, and milk. If you're concerned about those particular allergies or any allergies at all, please refrain from consuming these particular demonstrations.
Hopefully, everybody's got their A and B sample. You're presented with two cake samples. They are apple oat and cinnamon cakes. Both have been reduced in sugar to the same level. The fat levels, the egg content all remains the same. The recipes are identical with the sugar removed. The only difference is that in sample A, we've done nothing to replace the mouthfeel. We've done no reformulation. We've just removed the sugar and baked it, processed it in exactly the same way as the other sample. Sample B is our reformulated recipe. We've done this through the experience of our people, but also the science behind our solutions and also the science behind our combined solution portfolio. Some examples that we've included in here are the soluble fiber, PROMITOR. We've also got NUTRAVA Citrus Fiber.
We've got Stevia flavors and a HAMULTOP Stabiliser System in there as well. We have added this reformulation and these tools to build back the mouthfeel that should deliver on indulgence, but also a healthier cake. Starting with sample A. Your mouthfeel journey starts before you've even eaten the cake. The visual looks different to the other one. Probably looks different from a normal cake that you've seen. That's the first part. Now, move on to the tasting. Please take your first bite, and you should start to notice that it's a little bit heavy, a little bit dense, maybe a little bit dry and crumbly, or even some wetness in there as well. This is typically not a desirable experience for consuming a cake, and this is a product that we would say that consumers wouldn't want to buy again.
You may have only taken one bite of that one, but if you have, then just take a little sip of water just to clean your palate before you go for the next one. Sample B is our reformulated mouthfeel cake. As I said, same level of sugar reduction, but just had the mouthfeel replaced with some of our solutions. First, in the mouthfeel journey, you already start to see that your cake is a little higher in volume. It is a little higher in height as well. The color is a little bit more appealing, and also the crumb structure is what you would expect from a cake. Now, you can try that sample. You should start to notice the differences between A and B. It is a lot more lighter, a lot more airy, a lot more what you would associate with an indulgent cake.
Just remember, the sugar has been reduced in this. I can also say that in reformulating the product to build back the mouthfeel, we've also delivered a product that is high in fiber. It's non-HFSS compliant, which means it's non-high fat, salt, and sugar. It also carries a Nutriscore B on the consumer labels in Europe, therefore showing that by building back mouthfeel, we can deliver a healthier cake that is also indulgent. Thank you. Back to John.
Thank you, Will. We've seen what mouthfeel is and why it's important. Now let's look at how the combination of Tate & Lyle and CP Kelco creates a global leadership position in mouthfeel. This is based on three pillars of expertise. First is our consumer insights program in mouthfeel. Second is our cutting-edge mouthfeel science. Third is our market-leading mouthfeel portfolio.
We'll go through each of these in turn. We have an unrivaled understanding of the mouthfeel space. Our consumer insights team makes sure that when we work with customers, we're bringing a forward-looking view of consumer needs and expectations for mouthfeel. No one else in the industry really focuses on this area as closely as we do. A key point of difference for us is our proprietary consumer insights. We were the first company to develop a specific mouthfeel trends report that we launched last year in partnership with Kantar. To develop this report, we used social media listening, expert interviews, and consumer panels to really identify what are the mouthfeel experiences that consumers have for their favorite foods and how we see this evolving in the future.
As you can see on the screen beside me, this identified three sets of trends: elevated experiences, nourishment 2.0, and mouthfeel for a modern world. Looking at areas like how the next generation of convenient foods, how will that impact consumer expectations of mouthfeel? Even things like climate change. How will climate change impact the foods we eat, and how will that impact our expectations for mouthfeel experience? This report has really resonated with our customers, and many have told us that we're now leading in this space of bringing actionable consumer insights in mouthfeel. On your tables, you'll find some cards. There's a QR code on those cards. You can scan that code and download a summary of the report and see it for yourself. The second pillar of our expertise is obviously our cutting-edge science.
We are going to look at three areas here: our sensory science. This is how we know that the consumer products that we help to develop create the mouthfeel experiences that consumers are looking for. Our sensory experts work with consumer panels and focus groups where consumers select their favorite foods and then describe in detail what it is that they like about them, from the texture, the flavor, and the mouthfeel. Our experts take those descriptions and our consumers' own language, and they translate that into a technical lexicon, which we can then analyze, design, and replicate. Application science, this is the science of how to apply ingredients in food.
With so many foods, ingredients, recipes, and processing methods like drying and baking and fermenting and chilling, having that knowledge to really help our customers use our ingredients in precisely the right way is key to their success. The third area is our ingredient science. This is where we develop the next generation of specialty ingredients through our innovation pipeline. Victoria will talk more about that later this afternoon. Our consumer insights in mouthfeel, our cutting-edge science, add to that the leading portfolio of mouthfeel solutions and ingredients in our industry, made possible with the combination with CP Kelco. Our portfolio now contains over 200 individual starches and over 600 pectins and specialty gums.
Along with our fibers and our sweeteners, this gives us enormous versatility, flexibility, and control of our mouthfeel in everything from yogurts and dressings, snacks and energy drinks, and so many more. This range and versatility of our portfolio, this is unique. No one else in our industry has this breadth and depth across our three platforms. A key point I would like to make is that because of the combination with CP Kelco, as we heard already today, we can now solve problems for our customers that we could not solve before. Customers have a broad range of formulation challenges, and these can be summarized in three areas: optimize, reformulate, and innovate. When we work with our customers, we frame challenges this way to help us narrow down to the right solution. We are going to watch a short video now on customer needs.
In your day-to-day at the bench, we know that a key objective is to achieve excellent taste in your product formulations, and mouthfeel is a big part of it. At Tate & Lyle, we're leveraging our formulation expertise to map and solve your most pressing challenges in formulation and reformulation, where mouthfeel needs to be retained and elevated. We've identified three key opportunity areas we call optimize, reformulate, innovate. Optimize. What if there was a way to retain the mouthfeel experience of your product but optimize profitability? With optimize, we create formulation efficiencies that save costs and time, all while keeping what's best about your product's mouthfeel experience. Whether it's through process yield improvement or ingredient replacement, we will optimize your product using our industry-leading formulations and the science of mouthfeel. Reformulate. Today, consumers are on the lookout for healthier and cleaner products.
This, paired with increasing health regulations, makes products with cleaner labels, less sugar or fat, and plant-based alternatives more popular than ever. However, when doing this, your product's mouthfeel experience can be compromised. With reformulate, we can help you regain the mouthfeel lost when reformulating, helping you move the industry in building better products for the future. Innovate. How do you create a product that keeps consumers coming back for more? You can achieve this when you elevate the mouthfeel experience. With innovate, our team combines mouthfeel trends and consumer insights on preferred textures by category and geography with decades of experience in texture science to not only advise you on your next hit, but help you create it. To find the best solutions for your mouthfeel challenges, contact our team today. Tate & Lyle. Science, solutions, society.
So, how do we take our mouthfeel expertise and portfolio and translate that into an actual customer solution? Let's find out. For that, I will ask my colleague, Veronica Cueva, to join me on the stage. Veronica is our Vice President of Applications and Solutions Development, and she'll take us through a practical example. Over to you, Veronica.
Is this working? Yes. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. I hope everybody's keeping themselves hydrated because it's extremely hot here. Make sure you're drinking some water that you have on your table. As John said, my name is Veronica Cueva. I am a food scientist at Food Engineering. I have been in the food industry my whole career and with Tate & Lyle the last 13 years. I actually was a former customer for Tate & Lyle.
During these 13 years, I have seen a major transformation in our capabilities, our resources, and our actual solutions offering due to following the investments and the strengthening of those capabilities in areas as sensory science, analytical science, regulatory, nutrition, and applications, of course. As John mentioned, in this session, I want to showcase a practical case study on how all this comes together, how all these capabilities and expertise come together for us to deliver customer solutions. First, let me remind you what we mean by solutions. A solution is created when we bring together our capabilities and applications, category expertise, and a broad ingredient portfolio toolkit.
When compared to ingredient sale, application solutions require a much complex set of capabilities, but also strong inputs from R&D, product development, our technical service, and a good understanding of our customers, customers' processes, conditions, and understanding of how our ingredients are going to behave through those processes and conditions. We collaborate with customers in many different ways, but we know that when we collaborate in solutions, we have additional benefits. One, we build a stronger customer intimacy. We are much more engaged with our customers. The value of our ingredients in a solution tends to be higher and average 2x the value of that ingredient. For experience, as a scientist, as a leading group of scientists, as a formal customer, I can tell you that builds a stronger innovation partnership and more often leading more projects into our pipeline.
With consumer trends changing all the time, it is imperative that we work with our customers on those integrated solutions that they need today, but they also need for the future. To do this in a very effective way, we have developed a chassis approach for our solutions, effectively tailoring them, the core solutions to meet local tastes, local regulations, and the specific customer challenges. Let me give you a quick explanation of what this chassis is. A formulation chassis is a base framework or fundamental piece of technical knowledge for a specific category. It is developed ahead for our global teams, application teams, and then deployed and used to tackle customer challenges by our regional technical teams.
What is really, really exciting right now is the combination of CP Kelco at Tate & Lyle has brought our portfolio, and we are developing new toolkits, chassis toolkits that we're going to bring to the market, especially in the area of mouthfeel. It is very exciting, so stay tuned here. Before I go to the example, I want to talk a little bit about another tool, a proprietary tool that our sensory scientists have created. That tool is called Tate & Lyle Sensation. Tate & Lyle Sensation is used to keep taking consumer insights and translating those in effective solutions. Let's see how we talk about sensation with our customers.
Welcome to the mouthwatering world of mouthfeel. For most, mouthfeel isn't something we normally think about. For product formulators, it's crucial to cracking the code of successful foods and beverages. However, mastering mouthfeel is complex.
Consumers don't use the formulation language required to tell us their true preferences. For example, many say they like yogurt to be creamy. To a sensory scientist, creamy can mean smooth, thick, mouth-coating, or more. For consumers, creamy is creamy. That is why we developed Tate & Lyle Sensation, our mouthfeel formulation tool that bridges the gap between consumer language and scientific lexicon to help create superior product experiences quicker, easier, and tastier, all in three simple steps. Step one. First, we map what consumers want in market products, taking into account all sorts of things such as geography, category, and consumption moments. Step two, using a trademark process. Our sensory team translates the vocabulary used by consumers into scientific lexicon. Now they are speaking in our language.
This gives our team the insight they need to create our category-specific sensory wheels, which map out different aspects of mouthfeel like appearance, texture, and oral sensation, helping identify key attributes to maintain or avoid. Step three. Finally, our team utilizes our vast portfolio of ingredients to develop the right solution for each desired mouthfeel. With Tate & Lyle Sensation, we help you take truly differentiated products to market in a quicker and easier way. Contact us today to learn more. Tate & Lyle. Science, solutions, society.
Now, let's look at how all this comes together in practice. We're going to present you a better-for-you lo-fi yogurt case study. A dairy customer came to us with a challenge. They wanted to replace the gelatin in their formulation, but also improve the nutritional value of the yogurt.
Replacing gelatin is not easy, especially when you really understand the mouthfeel and the functionality that gelatin brings to the system. At the same time, we also have to maintain the indulgent mouthfeel, but also, very important, we wanted to make sure that the yogurt stays stable through the process, through the shelf life, and we have to be within these cost parameters dictated by the customer. How do we start? As John mentioned before, we approach these challenges leveraging three key areas of expertise: our consumer insights, our cutting-edge science, and our leading portfolio. Let's start. We talked to consumer yogurt users because we wanted to understand what they like from the yogurt, what they do not like from the yogurt, what they are expecting for a reduced-fat yogurt. This is some of the feedback that we receive.
When it comes to low-fat versions of yogurt, I would say that the texture compared to regular versions is not as thick and creamy. My experience with low-fat yogurts is that they're really thin and watery and kind of gross. I think they need to be a bit thicker and creamier. I just, I really don't enjoy them, to be really honest. Always has that layer of water over the top, and it can just feel like I'm not eating anything and I'm not getting satiated. I would say it's a little bit thinner than normal yogurt, especially the no-fat, plain, and Greek yogurts. My experience with low-fat versions of yogurt is that sometimes they don't feel very creamy or kind of nice tasting. They can be quite bland, and they could be quite watery.
We hear the consumers.
We use a proprietary sensation, Tate & Lyle Sensation tool, to translate those insights to a sensory lexicon. With a sensory lexicon, our scientists in applications and sensory start assessing what are those attributes and what do those attributes mean when we think about the technical solutions, and what is the combinatory effect of our ingredients that will help us deliver those sensory profiles that the consumer wants. With the benefit of the new portfolio, we have an expanded portfolio of hydrocolloids, gums, starches, fibers, and protein. Now, we're able to input these ingredients in the formulation, achieve different desired functionalities. The combination in CP Kelco and Tate & Lyle has significantly increased our solutions and chassis toolkits and our ability to solve customer challenges.
In this real example, the solution that we deliver to the customer, because we deliver a good solution, it has two different types of clear starches to be able to keep the stability of the yogurt through the process, but also through the shelf life. We utilize CP Kelco GENU Pectin to create a soft texture that is desired in the yogurt, and the combinations of Simplex, whey protein concentrate, and our PROMITOR soluble fiber enhance the softness and increase the nutritional profile of the yogurt. At the end, we meet our challenge. We were able to deliver an enhanced nutritional profile yogurt, a cleaner label, a superior mouthfeel, and it was delicious. With that, I'm going to pass it to Dr. John to finish, conclude our section on mouthfeel. Thank you.
Thank you, Veronica. Food is about enjoyment, and food is about taste.
We don't want to just feed people. We want to feed them well. Healthy food needs to be tasty if any of us are going to buy it as consumers. That is where mouthfeel is so important. We work with our customers to design mouthfeel experiences that consumers love to help make tasty food healthier and healthy food tastier. Let me wrap up by recapping on my three key messages. First, that mouthfeel is absolutely at the center of food and drink formulation. Two, that the combination of Tate & Lyle and CP Kelco creates a global leadership position in mouthfeel. Three, that the unique portfolio and technical expertise that we now have, particularly in mouthfeel, is really accelerating how we develop solutions for our customers. With that, I will hand over to the capable hands of my colleague, Dr. Clare Leonard, who leads our global nutrition and health sciences team. Over to you, Clare.
Thank you, John. It's becoming a bit of a competition up here. He thinks it's mouthfeel that's most important. I'd like to argue that maybe it's nutrition. I won't argue with him because actually it's quite exciting to have the combination of the two, which I'm going to talk about today. As John said, I'm Dr. Clare Leonard. I'm heading up the global nutrition and health science team here at Tate & Lyle. By way of background, I completed my degree and PhD here in the U.K. back in the 1990s. Since then, I've worked in big food companies like Mondelez, Unilever, and most recently, the Coca-Cola Company. I joined Tate & Lyle in January this year. This is my first role in an ingredients company.
I was a little bit nervous about that, to be honest. I was not sure how I was going to bridge from brands to ingredients. But it has actually been an extremely positive and exciting journey. This is a company where we can truly make a difference to all of those brands through the ingredients that we are supplying. We can really make a difference to consumer health by altering lots of different brands nutritionally. And as a career nutritionist, that is quite a truly exciting opportunity. To work for a company, as Nick said earlier, that has removed 40 trillion calories out of their diet in the last five years, is pretty impressive stuff, and it just shows the scope of what we can achieve. What is clear for me today is that the demand for healthier, more nutritious food is systemic, and it is really ever-growing.
The nutritional balancing or rebalancing of foods is a growth opportunity for us. Tate & Lyle is incredibly well-positioned to meet those consumer demands. I know I am a little bit biased, but as a nutrition scientist, I would say nutrition is a huge growth opportunity for us. I am going to start by looking at some of the data. Again, this has been mentioned, but it is really rather depressing for me as a nutritionist, the obesity statistics. Worldwide, obesity has more than doubled since 1990, and in adolescence, it has quadrupled in that time frame. It is estimated that two and a half billion adults, 43% of the global population, is either overweight or obese. It is not altogether surprising then that there has been this monumental rise in recent years in the transformation and use of drugs to treat obesity. Bless you.
It's estimated that 15 million people in the U.S. are currently using anti-obesity drugs, and that's set to double by 2035. 35 million people, or one in nine consumers in the U.S., will be using anti-obesity medication. By way of explanation, if you've heard of GLP-1s, those two terminologies are interchanged, and forgive me if I use the term GLP-1, but it's a type of anti-obesity medication. It's become a common name for the anti-obesity medication you may have heard. Lastly, the debate about ultra-processed foods. It's not going away. The classification of foods into their level of processing was developed many years ago, and it's just gaining traction all the time. As a nutritionist, of course, I struggle with this slightly. Processing of foods is absolutely crucial to make sure they're safe, they're accessible, and they're affordable to all.
What really matters is the nutritional content of what goes in. All foods have got a different nutritional profile. What really matters at the end of the day is making sure people are provided with the right nutritional profile to make a difference to their health. Last month, we convened a global roundtable on ultra-processed foods. We brought together leading scientists in this field to understand the opportunities around ultra-processed foods. There is a significant and a growing opportunity for us here to nutritionally rebalance foods. To actually design foods, to design processed foods to make a difference nutritionally is crucially important. While food still needs to be processed, we are so well-positioned to take out the sugar, the fat, and add in other nutrients like protein and fiber, and to really design those ultra-processed foods for better health.
Do you know what ultra-processed foods is beyond nutrition as well? It brings us back to the mouthfeel discussion and texture. Actually, when you think about it, the texture of foods affects how much you consume. The rate of consumption is affected by its mouthfeel. Even further down, we have physiological responses that change according to the texture and the mouthfeel of those foods. We can slow down the gastric emptying. We can slow down the way foods are digested. We can ensure people feel full after they've eaten. In simple terms, in addition to all the benefits that have been discussed earlier, our expertise in mouthfeel is actually really closely linked to developing texture-based solutions that could modify eating rates, they can modify nutrition, they can modify people's health ultimately.
It's a really key unlock, both our reformulation capabilities and our mouthfeel capabilities. If I turn to the anti-obesity medication, I'm going to start with a bit of science. At a basic level, what we eat leads to a release in hormones that tell our brain we feel full or not. It's through the release of the hormone insulin and the rate of gastric emptying that you begin to feel full and you begin to stop eating, the concept of satiety. Fibers and proteins can mimic the effects of some of these drugs. We want to put fibers and proteins into foods to mimic the effect of the drugs to help people more naturally feel full and satiated. We've been out to conduct research to look at the anti-obesity medication users. There were really these five critical areas that come to light.
These consumers really need nutrient density. When you're on these drugs, you actually can't consume a lot of food. You're eating a lot less. For every bite, you need to make sure you get a lot of nutritional bulk in there to ensure you reach your nutritional recommendations. With regards to gut health, we do know that there are side effects. When people are on these drugs, they feel nauseous, constipated, bloated. We can help people think about that gut and find solutions for gut health. Satiety is incredibly important. We want people to feel fuller on a smaller amount of food and on a smaller number of calories. Helping people, especially when they reduce the anti-obesity medication or they come off, we want to ensure they continue to feel full so that they don't get this rebound weight gain.
We tend to see that people do tend to gain their weight again within two years of coming off the anti-obesity medication. How can we help people feel fuller through natural solutions? Hydration. In the same way that your appetite cues are suppressed when you're on these drugs, it's the same for your hydration cues. Actually, we need to make sure people are drinking as well as eating for good health. Then permissible indulgence. We all know what it's like to be withdrawn from food. Food is there for pleasure. These poor people are working incredibly hard to manage their weight. They've taken to a medication solution. It's only fair that these people continue to be able to enjoy the small amounts of foods and drinks that they do consume.
Tate & Lyle are really well-positioned with over 200 solutions already available to meet the needs of these anti-obesity medication users. That is across the categories that we provide and across those solutions, those five areas that I have talked about. Our solutions can help before, during, and after the medication journey. Before, you have heard a lot already about reducing fat and sugar out of foods, adding in fiber, helping people on a healthier nutritional trajectory. During the drug use, we can help create foods that are nutritionally dense and help with satiety. Lastly, afterwards, the satiety becomes incredibly important there, as I mentioned, to help to prevent rebound weight gain. The good news is that there is going to be another tasting. I am going to ask my colleagues behind the scenes to bring out some samples for you to taste.
We've got some examples that are going to come out to meet the needs of users that are on these anti-obesity medications. I'm just going to pause whilst they get to your tables. As these are coming to your tables, I will mention allergens again. We don't want any concerns here. Please be aware that there is wheat, sesame, and milk in the allergens in the samples you're going to taste this afternoon. I'm going to ask you please to start with the hummus and crackers. Go ahead and take some hummus and crackers if you fancy it. I've already said that when you're on anti-obesity medication, your appetite is suppressed. People just don't eat big volumes of food. Often, people are replacing a meal with a snack. What you'll see here is a snacking solution, high-protein crackers and hummus.
We have increased both the levels of protein and fiber in those crackers, and the same with the hummus, to the extent that they have reached claimable levels from a regulatory perspective. We can really help consumers know what products to choose. They reach the claims for excellent source of fiber and rich source of protein. When we talk to consumers, the texture, as well as the flavor, is critically important to enable liking. They say they want crispy and crunchy crackers. I hope that is what you feel you have got in front of you. I feel I am going to rush you off your hummus and crackers. Please feel free to come back to them. Let me move on to the high-protein milkshakes that you have got in front of you as well. Take a sample A and a sample B.
I will restate, there is milk in here. If anybody's got an allergy, be careful. If you could taste sample A first, please. Sample A is a meal replacement drink that is on the market in the U.S.. It's designed to be especially high in protein to help people feel full on a high-protein weight management diet. Try sample B. Sample B is an improved chocolate milk that we have developed with an enhanced mouthfeel to meet the needs of people that are on anti-obesity medication. You'll hopefully see here that we've dialed up the creaminess and we've altered the mouthfeel of sample B to ensure that we meet the needs of those GLP-1 users that I mentioned earlier. Especially when you think about permissible indulgence, I think you'll agree that sample B tastes a lot nicer. It's richer, it's creamier.
Hopefully, it'll help to soothe some of those digestive discomforts with the nutrition that's in there. Lastly, that sample B brings ingredients from both Tate & Lyle and CP Kelco, so you're getting the best of both worlds. I want to talk a little bit about fiber before I leave the stage. Fiber is a key nutrient for all of us. This is a horribly complicated graph, really. The point is here in red, this is the recommendations across a number of different markets in the world. The blue bars are actual intakes in some of those markets. As nutritionists, we refer to this fiber gap, so the pink area. There is a vast difference between what we're recommended to consume and what people actually consume in terms of fiber. I'm going to pick on three of my colleagues, please, to stand up.
Bill, Victoria, Nick, would you mind just standing for a moment? There are 100 of us in the room here. There are three standing. Only 3% of U.K. adult population meet the fiber recommendations. That is statistics that came out from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey a couple of weeks ago. I just think it is very telling when we think only three of us in the whole room. That is most of us missing out on an absolutely critical nutrient for long-term health. We know that consumers are not eating enough fiber through natural foods, through whole foods. Increasingly, it is recognized that we need to fortify foods with additional fiber in order to close this fiber gap. Of course, Tate & Lyle is incredibly well-positioned to do that as we are the leading provider of soluble fibers. Our portfolio does a lot more than just provide nutrients.
This table shows you the green ticks is where we've been investing in nutrition research for many years to look at how our fibers and our sweeteners support consumer health in many areas that are top of mind and top of needs when we think of consumer health. Adding pectins to our portfolio gets me quite excited as a nutritionist because it brings new areas of health benefits that we're investing in. To conclude, I want to leave you with three messages today. The demand for healthier and more nutritious foods is systemic. It is ever-growing. Hopefully, I'm not going to be out of a job as a nutritionist for a few years. The nutritional rebalancing of food is a significant growth opportunity.
Tate & Lyle is well-positioned to deliver solutions to meet consumer needs, especially when we think of those on anti-obesity medication and in the area of ultra-processed foods. Thank you for listening. I'm going to hand over to Victoria, our Chief Science and Innovation Officer now. Thank you, Victoria.
Innovation distinguishes the leaders from the followers. I really hope that through the presentations that Nick and my colleagues have done thus far, you realize that science is how we at Tate & Lyle harness the power of nature to drive innovation and deliver customer solutions. Hello, everyone. My name is Victoria Spadaro Grant, and I have served as head of R&D for companies like PepsiCo, Mars, Cadbury, Barilla, and I am now Chief Science and Innovation Officer here at Tate & Lyle.
I have degrees in science and postgraduate degrees in science, and it makes me very excited and has helped me get tools and understanding to work with teams delivering innovation that is impactful and that brings to life the art of the possible. Ingredient sizing is fundamental to advance innovation and new solutions for our customers. As a former customer, I can assure you that the food industry does depend on ingredients innovation quite heavily. It is required to deliver new solutions that help optimize, improve the cost basis, reformulate for healthier options or better tasting options, and of course, innovate. We take agricultural crops such as corn, stevia, citrus fibers, chickpeas, and we extract the goodness and convert them into highly functional molecules that have very special performance in consumer formulations. Of course, it's not about solving today's problems only.
It is today, it is tomorrow, and it is about the future. We constantly push the limits of what is possible. In doing so, we create the next generation of specialty molecules that will continue positioning us at the center of the future of foods. Never has it been more important to drive the science of ingredients so we can support our customers. That is what is going to maintain us and help the customers reformulate. To do that, we do not only rely on the significant expertise that we have in-house. By the way, Didier mentioned that, over 250 years and significant state-of-the-art know-how. We also expand and have created a very extensive network and ecosystem where we have partnerships and collaborations that we invest in to be able to accelerate solutions and bring them faster to our customers.
You have heard many times today why we are all excited about the combination of Tate & Lyle and CP Kelco. It is because of the important functionality that these two ingredients bring when they are used together, the power of mouthfeel. It is when we combine these two portfolios, particularly the starches and the hydrocolloids, that we have an unrivaled, unprecedented, and frankly, unique competitive advantage. We can uniquely serve our customers. That is because we can create mouthfeel designs for very specific needs that customers have, like no one else can. You may ask yourselves, you heard the word mouthfeel so many times. How is that done? What happens and why? To do that, I would like to use an animation. I would like to describe first what is a starch. A starch is made of glucose molecules that link together.
They wrap around themselves, and they form small balls. Hydrocolloids are like strings, if you would. These are very large and heavy molecules that like and attract water. When we add water to a starch, what happens is that the starch swells. These particles of starch swell. When they start swelling, they start bumping to one another. As they bump, it becomes a very thick structure. Think at home, if you have flour and you add water, it becomes thick. When we add water to hydrocolloids, these large molecules, they attract the water, they disperse, they form a lattice. The magic happens when we combine the starches and the hydrocolloids together. The swollen balls of starch, all of the sudden, are maintained, suspended by the lattice that the hydrocolloids have created.
By modulating how much of the balls you are supporting with the lattice, you are changing the mouthfeel. The science gets better because by modifying the starches or modifying the hydrocolloids, we can actually modify the rate of hydration. We can modify the temperature at which they hydrate. We can modify how much they hydrate. We can modify how much they disperse, how much they link, and how much they suspend these two elements. That is what the mouthfeel is. This is, in a way, a graphic representation of mouthfeel, quite simplified, but to give you the idea.
This is the unique competitive advantage that we now have because our portfolio, which now has become quite unique with the significant number of starches and the incredible portfolio that CP Kelco brings into the whole, positions us to create incredible combinations, multiple combinations of starches and hydrocolloids for very specific mouthfeel designs. Clearly, quite difficult and time-consuming thinking about all the possible combinations. This is one of the many reasons why we have invented and invested in ALFIE. ALFIE is our automated lab for ingredient experimentation and is physically located in Singapore. ALFIE represents a revolution in the food industry. There is nothing like it, and there is nothing that any competitor could do like this. It provides significantly faster and significantly accurate design of mouthfeel. We can develop products at speeds that no one, not even ourselves, could do before, more than 10 x faster.
We can characterize customer solutions in ways that no one has been able to do before. This is done by pioneering use of robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. I would like to invite you to watch this video that describes more about ALFIE.
Hello and welcome to our tour of ALFIE, Tate & Lyle's automated lab for research and experimental design located in Singapore. My name is Jim Smoot. I'm the Director of Research and Innovation for starches and proteins, and I'm based in our Hoffman Estates site near Chicago. Let's take a few minutes and explore how ALFIE, our state-of-the-art robotically automated system, is revolutionizing food ingredient innovation. With its dual robot setup, ALFIE produces and characterizes food ingredient samples at 10 x the speed of a normal R&D process.
It mimics a commercial manufacturing process to create new ingredients and performs a series of tests to predict the ingredients' performance in foods and beverages with minimal human intervention. The speed and power of ALFIE gives us the unrivaled ability to give our customers the best solutions in the shortest amount of time. This system is the first of its kind in the world. ALFIE is redefining what is possible in food formulation, turning our purpose into progress and shaping a healthier, more sustainable future through the science of food. Innovation knows no borders. Strategically located in Singapore, ALFIE connects our global teams, enabling real-time collaboration and faster innovation. At only seven hours flight from half the world's population, it's close to many of our customers. With global connectivity, ALFIE can be operated by the teams in both our Singapore and Chicago offices.
This connectivity enables both teams to generate and access output data collaboratively. Hi, my name is Kate Yeo, and I lead the sales and commercial team in ASEAN, ANZ, and South Asia. ALFIE brings a very unique proposition to our customers in the region because it's one of a kind equipment and R&D resource we have in Asia-Pacific. All the customers who've come through have been super impressed and very, very excited about the potential of working with us together, especially in areas of textures and mouthfeel. Two robots, one mission: smarter ingredient innovation. Let's take a closer look at how ALFIE turns ideas into insights faster than ever. Think of ALFIE as a compact, automated version of a commercial food ingredient manufacturing plant designed not to make finished foods and beverages, but to create the ingredients that will help deliver the best finished food product.
It can run 24 hours a day, powered by two specialized robots. The sample preparation system rapidly produces small batches of ingredient prototypes, just like a full-scale facility, but faster and smarter. It is flexible, handling both traditional starch processes and new experimental ones. It is globally connected. A scientist in Chicago can send a recipe to Singapore. Once the ingredients are loaded, ALFIE gets to work, no travel needed. It is fully automated. ALFIE handles everything: measuring, mixing, and processing. No manual steps, no delays. It can prepare multiple samples at once, accelerating our ability to test, learn, and deliver. Once we have our ingredient sample, it moves to the characterization stage. The characterization robot is where we find out how that ingredient will perform as soon as the sample is ready. It is tested under a variety of conditions, such as heat, shear, or acidity.
This simulates the stresses our ingredients face to predict how the ingredients will behave in actual food products. From sauces to yogurts to gummies, multiple robotic arms run tests in parallel, delivering faster results and deeper insights. It also helps us explore how ingredients work together. Especially now, with our expanded mouthfeel capabilities through CP Kelco's portfolio, we can study how starches and hydrocolloids interact and discover combinations that are even more powerful than the ingredients on their own. In short, ALFIE gives us speed, accuracy, and the power to innovate with confidence, helping us create even better ingredients for our customers. ALFIE's capability enables us to formulate better into our final food product. We know that viscosity enables us to create a yogurt with different types of texture compared to another yogurt, which is more runny.
Starch emulsifying capability enables us to formulate mayonnaise, which is more smooth and more spoonable, as it is expected by our consumer. The Italian dressing, as we can see here, on the other hand, it is expected to be phase separated, and we do not need emulsifying starch to perform the job. Finally, we do have different gelling starches that enable us to formulate into a gummy. For example, like this one, it is less firm. Some consumers would prefer a gummy which is more firm as well as less elastic. Every time ALFIE runs a test, it's not just creating ingredient prototypes. It's collecting valuable data. With every run, ALFIE gets smarter, helping us predict, perfect, and perform. As this data grows, we're building powerful models using AI and advanced analytics to analyze it.
These models help us predict how ingredients will perform, how they'll taste, and how they'll feel in the mouth, even before we make them. That means our technical teams can solve customer challenges faster, with more precision and fewer trial and error steps. We're not just speeding up innovation. We're expanding it. ALFIE allows us to run broader experiments than ever before, helping us map how ingredient structure affects performance. These maps will guide us to the right solutions quicker and more accurately. As the system matures, we'll go even deeper, predicting how ingredients interact under different conditions and fine-tuning things like texture, thickness, and gelling to deliver the perfect mouthfeel. From lab to table, the proof is in the taste and the mouthfeel. ALFIE is more than a machine. It's a leap forward, transforming lives through the science of food.
Right.
As Jim said, this is not only accelerating innovation, but it is expanding the innovation. It is, along with our portfolio of starches and hydrocolloids and fibers, making us uniquely positioned to address pretty much any mouthfeel challenge. We have two very unique competitive advantages: our portfolio and ALFIE. Ensuring that new and existing ingredients and solutions can be applied very quickly, specifically, and accurately is very critical. For that purpose, we have to be close to our customers. Technical solutions are global, but taste is local. We have to be next to the customers to best and most optimally be able to work with them. To support our customers, we have a global network of 21 customer collaboration centers.
Customer collaboration centers are laboratories and pilot plants where our customers come to and work along with our scientists and application specialists to solve, address the problems of optimization, reformulation, or innovation. You will notice that there is a significant amount of customer collaboration centers in markets like Asia, Turkey, Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. These are our fastest-growing markets. These are the markets where we also realize that the innovation happens fastest with consumers. That is why we have purposely located our laboratories there. Our innovation approach has delivered consistently strong results. Over the last five years, our innovation pipeline has added 63 new products. Among them, the Tasteva Sol, which is a type of stevia that is highly soluble, making it quite easy for our customers to formulate with. We added a significant number of line extensions to PROMITOR, our soluble fiber portfolio.
We have also added line extensions to CLARIA, which is the clean label line of starches. Over the same period, the reported revenue from new products increased by 14% on a compound annual growth rate. As a percentage of food and beverage solutions, revenue increased from 12%- 18%. On a like-for-like basis, new product revenue increased by an average of 26% over the same period of five years. Altogether now, with CP Kelco pipeline and Tate & Lyle pipeline, we have a combined pipeline that is worth $430 million, projecting into the future. That is reflecting not only a step up in our scientific capabilities, but also the much closer collaboration we have with our customers. To conclude, I would like to reiterate a couple of messages.
Number one, ingredient science is crucial for our customers so we can continue developing and delivering new ingredient innovation and solutions. We invest in partnerships and technologies that help accelerate and bring to life the solutions that are required by our customers today and into the future. Lastly, we have a track record of consistent delivery of innovation and customer solutions. As I said at the beginning, innovation distinguishes the leaders from the followers, and we are a leader. Thank you. With that, I would like to hand over to Sarah.
Thank you, Victoria. I'm Sarah Kauijlaars, the Chief Financial Officer, and I joined Tate & Lyle last September. My background is in large, global extraction and manufacturing industries.
Over the last nine months, I've enjoyed getting to know the technologies, capabilities, and people that differentiate Tate & Lyle from its peers and to better understand the intricacies of the food industry. During my travels around the group, it's become clear to me that we have the strategy, portfolio, and people to deliver on our commitments. Tate & Lyle has truly transformed over the last seven years. Today, we are a GBP 2.1 billion revenue specialty business, generating over GBP 400 million of EBITDA per annum. We're highly cash-generative, with free cash flow over the last five years exceeding GBP 700 million. We're a well-balanced and resilient business, generating revenue across the globe and across our three platforms of sweetening, mouthfeel, and fortification. More than 70% of revenue comes from our four core categories of dairy, beverage, soups, sauces, and dressings, and bakery and snacks.
As you've heard today, food formulation is complex and science-driven. Our expanded portfolio now provides over 1,000 different ingredients for customers used to make food and drink healthier and tastier. While the food industry is global, taste is local. That is why, in addition to our local customer innovation and collaboration centers, we operate a regional manufacturing network from which we can serve our customers in their local markets. Our supply chain is diversified both geographically and across crop inputs. All our key raw materials come from nature, including corn, stevia leaf, and citrus peel. Today, ingredients made from corn are less than 50% of revenue compared to over 85% five years ago. The resilience of our regional manufacturing model and agile supply chain means we are very well placed to supply our customers in periods of geopolitical uncertainty.
As we previously announced, we started to operate as one combined business on 1st of April. We have moved to a regional operating model, and hence we will now report on this basis. Our regions are empowered to deliver performance across the entire portfolio. The acceleration of our top line relies on these regions leveraging the combined portfolio day in and day out. Sucralose has delivered consistent margins over a sustained period. Given the increased scale that CP Kelco has brought into the business, sucralose is now simply one of the many sweeteners in our portfolio and for that reason has been folded into our regional reporting. We recognize the importance of providing visibility of CP Kelco's continued margin recovery. For the near term, we will give supplementary disclosure of the margin progression of CP Kelco's portfolio in aggregate.
Given the significant benefits of the combination with CP Kelco, as Nick explained earlier, we continue to expect the enlarged Tate & Lyle to deliver an attractive financial algorithm over the medium term. This means that on average, per year across the cycle, we will grow revenue at the higher end of 4%-6% per year. Revenue growth will be from a combination of factors driven by our growing addressable markets, our repositioning of the business to focus on growth trends in the food industry, CP Kelco's continued recovery, revenue synergies from the combination, and underlying volume, mix, and price. We will deliver positive operational leverage with EBITDA growth ahead of revenue. We will also benefit in the 2027 financial year from further recovery in CP Kelco's ingredient portfolio and cost synergies delivery, assuming a return to more stable market conditions.
This will translate into earnings per share growth ahead of EBITDA. We will continue to focus on cash and strong cash generation with cash conversion of greater than 75% in each year. Our strong balance sheet supports investment in growth, with leverage maintained comfortably within the range of 1x-2.5x net debt to EBITDA. Moving to CP Kelco integration, I'm pleased to report it continues to go well, reinforcing our confidence in delivering the cost and revenue synergies that we've laid out. We have already taken concrete steps on cost synergies and expect to deliver more than $25 million in run rate savings in this financial year. Let me give you some early examples. Throughout the integration process, we put a real focus on creating a new organization, simple and agile, and contained to the best of both businesses.
As a result, we have removed duplicated senior roles and delayered the organization. We have closed office space in Atlanta and Dubai, and further office rationalization projects are being finalized. We are pursuing a single approach to procurement with early examples, including efficiency opportunities from the cross-supply of ingredients, consolidation of raw material purchases, logistics, and insurance costs. Overall, we're making strong progress, and I'm confident we will deliver our total targeted cost synergies of $50 million. The positive engagement we are seeing with customers and our increased customer access around the world gives us confidence that we will deliver our targeted revenue synergies of 10% of CP Kelco's revenue over the medium term. Our focus is on two main areas: building cross-selling capabilities and increasing direct service for selected CP Kelco customers.
Looking at cross-selling first, using our combined portfolio and capabilities to build broader and deeper relationships with existing customers, as well as building relationships with new customers, is a key opportunity, particularly given our leadership position in mouthfeel. I've just returned from Singapore, our regional headquarters in Asia. It was fantastic to see how interactions our team is having with customers and how our investment in ALFIE, which Victoria talked about earlier, is supporting new product development and accelerating our customer speed to market. To support the acceleration of top-line growth from our enlarged portfolio, we've implemented a global training program for both our commercial and technical teams. In addition, we have revised our sales incentive scheme to directly incentivize cross-selling and have improved our customer relationship management tools. Dedicated technical teams are also actively involved in daily customer-facing engagements.
The second key area of focus for revenue synergies is the migration of certain customer relationships in CP Kelco's business from distribution to a direct service model. Historically, more than half of CP Kelco's revenue is earned through the distribution channel, higher than our own, which is closer to 15%. Our overall approach in bringing these relationships in-house is to concentrate our remaining distribution business with our stronger partners and migrating smaller accounts to them. We are seeing a positive response from customers to our approach. Our productivity program continues to perform well. As we stated in our four-year results a few weeks ago, we have delivered an impressive $91 million of productivity savings over the last two years and are well ahead of the run rate required to meet our five-year target of $150 million savings by 2028.
This program is benefiting from our investments in new digital systems and the use of AI in our plants to improve efficiency and lower costs in areas such as production scheduling and forecasting. Since 2018, we've delivered savings of more than $270 million, demonstrating the strong productivity culture embedded within the business. This program is now active across our expanded operational footprint, and we expect to see further progress in the future. Productivity savings, which are separate from synergy savings, are either reinvested in growth or taken to the bottom line. Turning to the specialty nature of our portfolio, the disciplined management of volume, mix, and price, and more solution selling together with productivity have been important levers in delivering significant margin expansion. Over the last five years, we have grown EBITDA margin to 21% as we transition to the fully focused specialty business we are today.
This figure, which compares favorably to our specialty ingredient peers, includes CP Kelco's product portfolio for the first time. We remain confident that the margin of CP Kelco's portfolio will continue to strengthen over the medium term. Reflecting the breadth and strength of our portfolio, it's pleasing to see that our specialty margins are consistent across our platforms and categories, with each one at or above 20%. The margin in mouthfeel is expected to improve further over time, reflecting the phased recovery of the CP Kelco portfolio. What are the drivers of our specialty ingredient margin? I believe there are four. Our ingredients add high levels of functionality to our customers' products, with a key indicator being their low inclusion rates. An inclusion rate is the percentage of the mass of the finished product from an ingredient.
The inclusion rates for our portfolio range from 0.1% to around 5%, depending on the ingredient and application. Investment in R&D and innovation is critical to ensure our portfolio remains relevant to our customers. It also creates a consistent pipeline of differentiated ingredients and solutions for which we are rewarded by high margins. As Victoria said earlier, we have invested over $370 million in R&D and solution selling. Building a patent portfolio is an important part of our scientific strength and helps to protect our specialty ingredient portfolio and know-how. We have nearly 1,000 patents in place and around 300 pending, reflecting our investment in innovation over the last few years. Finally, providing deep ingredient knowledge, applications capability, and technical support for our customers is another key part of our specialty offering. We have trebled the size of our applications and technical services team over the last five years.
Together, the specialty nature of our portfolio, the unique expertise, and services we offer enable us to meet the needs of our customers, deliver healthier, tastier, and more sustainable food and drink. Turning to capital allocation, our approach remains unchanged. Our priority remains a disciplined deployment of capital and to maintain our financial strength. We have a clear prioritization. First, investment in organic growth. Secondly, investment acquisitions, joint ventures, and partnerships. Thirdly, our progressive dividend policy, with which we have a consistent track record of growing the dividend. Finally, as we have shown over the last three years, we will consider returning capital to shareholders where appropriate. We have a strong balance sheet giving us flexibility to invest in growth.
Looking forward, we want to retain the flexibility to use this balance sheet to drive value-accretive growth and to maintain long-term efficient leverage in the range of 1x-2.5x net debt to EBITDA. At 31 March, leverage was 2.2x , and within the next two years, we intend to deleverage towards the midpoint of this long-term range. Capital expenditure for the current 2026 financial year is expected to be in the range of GBP 120 million-GBP 140 million. Looking further ahead, we expect CapEx intensity to be between 6%-7% of revenue in the 2027-2028 financial years, consistent with recent investment levels in Tate & Lyle. Our capital spend in this period will continue to be focused in three areas: growth, sustaining, and productivity. We expect investments in growth CapEx to be around 30%-40% of total expenditure.
Growth projects are expected to achieve at least an internal rate of return of 20%, well above our return on capital employed. Sustaining investments, which include maintenance and sustainability, are expected to be about 50%-60% of total spend in each year. Productivity investments, while the smallest part of our total spend, remain important and are expected to be between 5%-15% of total spend. The transformed Tate & Lyle has the strategy, portfolio, and people to accelerate top-line growth. We are focused on delivering the benefits of the CP Kelco combination, our synergy commitments, and maintaining financial discipline to deliver an attractive value proposition as a growth-focused business and attractive shareholder returns. With that, let me hand you back to Nick.
Thank you, Sarah, and indeed to all of our presenters from this afternoon.
I hope from this afternoon you can see that the new Tate & Lyle really is a growth-focused specialty food and beverage solutions business, a global leader in food and drink reformulation. We see significant growth opportunities ahead as a result of that, which gives us real confidence in our ability to grow ahead of the overall market, the 4%-6% range we talked about in our financial framework. As I said earlier, the food industry really is at an inflection point. To meet the health and dietary challenges the world is facing, a significant proportion, as Clare demonstrates today, of the day-to-day food and drink we consume will need to be reformulated.
With the portfolio and capabilities we showed you today, we really are uniquely placed to benefit from this growth opportunity, and that's the basis for how we believe we can grow ahead of the market, augmented by the significant benefits from the CP Kelco combination. The new Tate & Lyle really has been repositioned to be at the center of the future of food. We're focused on creating solutions that meet growing consumer demand for healthier, tastier, and more sustainable food and drink. We're operating in exciting segments of the market, and our focus now is on accelerating top-line growth around the world. I want to leave you with where I started, which is the four key messages I started with today. Firstly, our structural transformation into a specialty business is complete following the combination with CP Kelco.
Secondly, we have leading positions across sweetening, mouthfeel, and fortification, and as a result, we really are well placed to meet the growing global demand for healthier, more nutritious food and drink. Thirdly, because of our unique portfolio and enhanced capabilities, we have significantly increased our ability to be that partner of choice for our customers, and we intend to do that around the world. I think you can see we have a clear strategy for accelerating growth and, importantly, delivering attractive shareholder returns. Together with CP Kelco, we are a business that really is fueled by science, is obsessed with customer collaboration, and has a strong desire to make a positive impact on the world as we grow.
Science Solutions Society, that is our commitment to ourselves and all our stakeholders, and I hope you saw that commitment in the passion, belief, and the energy of the people and the team today. With that, that is the end of our presentation. We will obviously regroup in Skensved on Thursday as well with some of you, but in the meantime, I would like to invite Sarah, Didier, and Bill to join me on the stage to answer any questions you might have. We are just going to take a short break while we set the stage up, so please bear with us for a couple of minutes, and thank you. Shadows faded like lovers losing track. Passionate, we always hide our crimes. Youthful, because we never turn our backs. Ready, yeah? Yeah.
Okay. To ask a question in the normal fashion, please, if you are in the room, put your hand up.
A roving mic will find you and give your name and your institution at the beginning of your question. If you're watching online and you'd like to submit a question, please use the box at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, and I will read your question out for you. [audio distortion], thank you.
Thank you. Chris Pitcher from Rothschild & Co Redburn. Nick and the team, thank you for a really comprehensive overview of the capabilities and the infrastructure you've put in place to sort of become a solutions selling business. The one thing versus the capital markets there in 2023 that maybe was not there was how much of your business is solutions today and what are the aspirations for the future?
Following on from that, what do you think perhaps have been some of the challenges in selling solutions rather than just ingredients, which Veronica in her presentation highlighted the significant benefits of moving towards solutions? Thank you.
Thanks, Chris, and I'm glad you gave me your name because you can't actually see anybody because of the lights. Anyway, our aspiration to increase the mix of solutions in the business is undimmed, and I'll maybe ask Bill to talk a bit about the pipeline we're seeing coming through in a minute. As we've put the businesses together, we're still working through precisely how we reset the base and build a new target. I wouldn't take a lack of detailed disclosure at this point as a lack of belief in the importance of the future of solutions as part of the mix.
We just need to work through some of the details, and we'll continue to report on that over time when we've sort of cleaned up the two businesses and put them together. We're still very early in doing all of that. In terms of your second question about challenges, if I go back seven years, seven, eight years, we had to completely re-engineer our whole commercial front end. It wasn't that we didn't have the science or we didn't have an expanded portfolio that we were building. We needed to build the customer-facing capability to face into them in a different way. Selling a solution requires a very different organization, a very different capability, and a very different relationship with your customers. You heard Veronica talk about that a bit earlier, and those things are still building. Those were all real challenges.
If I go back to where we started this journey, as we bring the two businesses together, we're sharing the learnings from those challenges and those shared journeys. We are night and day better at it today than we were previously. On top of that, we needed to build that capability globally. If you saw the chart with all of the application labs around the world, 70% of those being in faster-growing markets. Seven years ago, that coverage was significantly lower. We have had to completely re-engineer our commercial organization. I think about it as a sort of three-legged stool. You have your sales organization, which is managing the customer relationship. You have your category teams who are really working with the platform teams to develop the capability and the ammunition to take to customers.
If you like the push of what we do versus the pull from them. There is this critical leg of that three-legged stool, which is your applications and technical capability, the people who really work with the customers on formulation in our labs, utilizing world-class technology like ALFIE. Bill, I do not know, maybe just to add on the solution side, a little bit on what we are seeing in terms of the development of the pipeline as we have put the two businesses together.
Yeah, thanks, Nick. I think, as Nick said, we need to re-baseline the metrics as we bring the organizations together, but we do know even before the combination that we were increasing the delivery of wins that were solutions-driven in the legacy Tate & Lyle business.
Much of what you heard talk about today, this combinatorial knowledge and bringing starch and hydrocolloids together and deploying it to customers, most of that is going to be a solutions approach with customers. As we see that pipeline develop, we are seeing an acceleration of the pipeline that is of a solutions nature, and I would expect that we'll, once we re-baseline metrics, see an acceleration as a result of the combination.
Should we take one more from the room, and then I have an online one?
Yeah, hi, thanks. It's Alex Sloane from Barclays. I'll echo the thanks for the granular presentations today. I've got a few questions, if that's okay. I mean, the first one, it's good to hear the confidence on the margin rebuild in CP Kelco.
I think in the past, you've talked about getting back to a sort of 20%+ EBITDA margin before synergies. I’d love to hear from you, Didier, in terms of where you see the kind of key opportunities for that recovery. Second one on reformulation. I mean, we're seeing a lot of U.S. food customers right now pledging to take out artificial colors from their food products. I appreciate you don't sell artificial colors or natural colors, but how do you ensure, I mean, a lot of the products that you sell into will have colors in them. How do you ensure that Tate wins its fair share of that reformulation? Can you put in some of those colors into the ALFIE machine, which you showed us, which looked very cool? One final one, just very brief clarification just for Sarah.
I think when you were presenting the financial algorithm, I might have heard it wrong, but I think you caveated that it was assuming a return to kind of more stabilized operating conditions. Is that just referring to the kind of tariff stuff that you outlined in May not escalating, or is there something that you're assuming in terms of end markets that need to improve to achieve that algorithm? Thank you.
Didier, why don't you talk about the margin recovery in CP Kelco?
Margin recovery pre-synergies, I would say think about it in about three buckets. One is we're recovering from turbulent times with COVID, consumer changes, war in Ukraine, which impacted our pectin business. Following destocking, following higher energy prices, we ended up having high inventory levels and higher cost on pectin. We see that normalizing. We have redeployed our business.
You saw the balance we have across regions. The volume is back. The costs are down. Energy is normalizing. We see volume leverage going down the P&L and the margins. The second bucket will be all the investments I talked about. A big share of it is going into improving our bio-gums assets, the bio-fermentation assets, and in particular, adding capacity so that we can sell more, but also adding lower-cost capacity so that we have better competitiveness, but also higher margins. We are commissioning those assets as we speak. Customers are approving the products that we made and demonstrating the capability to do it. When this flows through, we will have a margin recovery. The third one is the mixed impact. Everything we talked about, about selling more differentiated products, selling more solutions, they will be at a higher margin.
That will be the third bucket.
Alex, your second question about artificial colors, natural colors in the U.S., I think is a specific example of a more general focus on improving the nutritional content of processed foods. You, Clare, I thought, presented it very elegantly today. We are at the core of that because of the impact that reformulation has on mouthfeel, not just sweetness, etc., and the core, therefore, of being part of the reformulation solution that still makes it acceptable and consumer-preferred. The way to do that is to demonstrate that we are the best at helping with our customers. It is a reinforcement of the points we were making today about this idea that the food industry is reaching an inflection point. I mean, look what happened at the weekend.
The government, retailers, and U.K. food manufacturers announced the forming of a soft coalition to solve for the $11 billion cost of obesity to National Health, precisely through doing some of the things we can help with. We are starting to see some of these regulatory focus areas impact food manufacturers' willingness to reformulate and therefore create a greater platform for us to build the right relationships. I think the last question was for you, Sarah, was it not?
Thank you. Indeed, I think based on what we know today, we are confident that we are targeting the revenue growth and the leverage going down to EBITDA and EPS. You mentioned tariffs, and we gave more detail about tariffs back in May, and you recall that the main axis is U.S. and China. Let's see what happens next week and beyond.
I think we've got to acknowledge there's a broader macro uncertainty that we will have to navigate, and we are confident that we're going to navigate. Given that macro uncertainty and the geopolitical uncertainty out there, I think it's only fair to caveat based on where you're not to know this is what we're targeting.
Okay. I have an online question from the line of Joan Lim at BNP Paribas Exane. Where do you see normal EBITDA margins for mouthfeel? Will it be above the levels of the other two platforms?
I'll give you a simple response to that. We currently believe that we're going to see an improvement in mouthfeel margins, and that's based on some of the things Didier just talked about. Because when you look at the mouthfeel portfolio, it's broadly two-thirds hydrocolloids.
Naturally, the recovery path of ex-CPK products that we announced when we put the transaction together will enhance mouthfeel margins. I think over time, we will see how margins settle down across the three platforms. Increasingly, I think there's probably going to be a blurring across them as well as we look to formulate increasingly across the three platforms. We are absolutely expecting to see mouthfeel margins improve over the next few years.
Okay. There's a follow-up from Joan. Joan Lim at BNP Paribas Exane. What do you see as the right level of R&D spend for the new company?
I mean, R&D spend is often measured in very different ways, companies by companies. I think much more about how much pressure we're putting into customer-facing capability, including R&D. End-to-end R&D, the investment we're making in our commercial application and technical capability.
We feel very well invested today to deliver on the growth opportunities we see ahead. Frankly, I'm not sure what the right number is. It'll evolve over time as the business develops. What we won't do is stop investing in it because it's a critical component of fueling top-line growth. The investment we made in ALFIE, by the way, was 10 years in its genesis, from the initial germ to the final solution. This is also a long-term game. It's not just for today. ALFIE will only start to deliver benefits 10 years after we conceived it in the first place. It gives us a really powerful weapon today. We're going to have to think about investing in our R&D for the future. Our thinking on that will inevitably evolve. We know we're well invested today.
We're especially well invested in terms of customer-facing capabilities in each of our key growth markets. That is one of the benefits we now have to accelerate growth.
We have a question on the floor, Karel. Yes, thank you.
It's Karel Zoete with Kepler Cheuvreux. I've got two questions. The first one is on growth. You highlight the business has grown around 5% a year, but we have quite some volatility between the years. At the same time, we have some data on the growth from new products. The thing I'm curious at is, can you highlight some things that have worked really well for you in terms of growth along the three platforms, so mouthfeel, fiber, sweetness, and things that have not done? Because that always remains a bit difficult. You have so many products to sell, sometimes combinations, sometimes not.
What has been successful and what not, and for what reason? The second question is more precise, maybe. It's about the pectin market. There you have a big position, upgraded some facilities, etc. What does the market look like in terms of competitive space? How has CP Kelco fared against its competitive set? How has it differentiated versus competition? Thank you.
I think I know where the second question is going, but let me answer the first one. I mean, through all of that volatility that we've seen in the last five or six years, the good news is we've seen very consistent revenue and EBITDA progression through that period. That talks to the resilience of the business, very much helped by the successful growth of new products.
Now, the nice thing about the new products environments is it's not kind of one big rifle shot. It's quite distributed across the three platforms. We have successfully grown our sweetener platform, with Stevia being a core part of that. We have successfully grown in the old Tate & Lyle business our clean label starches. That has been a big driver. Then on the fortification platform, we have seen really good growth from fiber. I believe we are only just starting there, by the way, because of some of the deficit numbers that Clare talked about earlier. Have we had some challenges along the way? Of course we have, because you are not going to get every single new product right. I have been a bit disappointed by the pace of growth of allulose. That has not been helped by regulatory challenges either, though, in terms of approvals around the world.
I think the key is, and this is the point we sort of try to make consistently, which is it's the breadth and depth of the three platforms that really matters ultimately, because then you can build multiple vehicles for growth rather than one rifle shot. I think Didier would say, "Look, only being in hydrocolloids was a real constraint on growth," which is why when we started to talk about putting the two businesses together, we were both very, very excited about the potential. I'm not going to talk about the pectin market. I'm going to get the expert to do that.
The way I would look at the questions is two sides of it. One is the pectin franchise, and is it growing and where? The second one is how are we positioned as CP Kelco to win in this market?
First one is pectin. Other than a blip during the COVID time, particularly driven by soft demand in Asia when everyone was at home, pectin franchise has been growing continuously. It's been growing fueled by dairy products. It's been growing fueled by nutrition, by the need to have gummies that used to be endogens, but now it's a way to deliver nutrition. We see the volume growing nicely in different segments. I would think about the pectin not only as one product, but you have to think about it as a portfolio of solutions. The different products, different fruits, as you understand, or peel that we can use, different technology, we're using to deliver very different functionalities from gelling, film forming, stabilizing proteins, gut health. Those are very different products. They're all called pectin, but they're very, very different. Some are growing faster than others.
Everything that has to do with nutrition, with delivering nutrition, with stabilizing proteins, you understood the high-protein diets are on the rise. All that is growing faster than what could be high-sugar products. If you take a regular jam, this is growing slowly or contracting sometime. If you take a low-sugar jam, that's a different pectin, but this has a different growth rate. All in all, depending on the categories, the pectin franchise is growing. That is driven by the fact that it has a very, very clean image. Nick talked about clean label. When you ask customer panels what ingredients they prefer, pectin is top of the list all the time, because this is the ingredient that grandma used to have at home to make jams, essentially. That has a very, very natural image, very consumer-friendly.
It is growing, and it's seen as one of the really star products in the hydrocolloid industry. Now, we are the larger one. We have an industry-leading position. We got a higher share than one-third of the business. We are well-positioned to keep it. Why is that? As I was saying, peel is a critical raw material. We are the only company integrated into peel in Brazil because we are integrated in the supply chain when we ship the fresh peel to our plant and extract the pectin. That's a huge cost advantage. You don't have to dry it. It doesn't deteriorate, so you have better pectin at the end of it, and you don't have to ship the peel. For our plants in Europe, we're also making the dry peel for our needs. Therefore, it is better quality.
We're using a patented technology, and we make better pectin at the end. The raw material is a critical source of advantage, competitive advantage, and we are the only one enjoying that. When you look at the scale, we got two of the largest plants in the world. Same thing. Think about it about portfolio. Don't know if you will go to Skensved in Denmark with us, but you will see a very large plant, the larger plants doing LM pectin, scale models for that manufacturing. While in Brazil, you will have the largest plant, the lowest-cost plant in the world doing HM pectin. Very well-positioned, very well-positioned to weather any changes in raw material supplies because we are integrated into it, because we are leveraging our presence in Brazil. Oranges are cheaper than lime, which are cheaper than lemon.
We are also enjoying the low-cost raw materials. We have a dedicated team doing only raw material sourcing. We have a technology team looking at how to optimize those fruits and different types of fruits. We have an application team looking at how to optimize the pectin molecules in specific applications. When you combine all that, that makes the market leader. Those are capabilities that are very, very difficult to acquire.
Thanks, Didier.
In the middle, [audio distortion].
Hi, everyone. Thanks for the presentation. I'm Michael Rapps from Converium Capital. I wanted to ask you a bit about margins again. There was a slide up there that showed margins by geography. They are far different if you go Asia, Europe, U.S., which is maybe inconsistent with the stability of the margins across mouthfeel, fortification, etc.
My question is, do you expect the margin profile shown by geography to stay the same? If not, what causes it to evolve and improve? Thanks.
Sarah?
Thank you, Nick. Yeah, thanks for the question. I think, as you're right, there's a variety across the regions. Maybe we take the Americas first, which has got the highest margin. That's supported by a significant portion of the sucralose portfolio, which you talked about in May has got 31%. That's a real boost. Also, the Americas is larger, so obviously, you've got some benefit from scale there. Europe is obviously impacted by the Middle East, and then Asia, of course, is the growing margin. They were actively investing to grow the top line, given we've got, particularly in Asia, we've got access to half the world's population spread from India to Japan down to New Zealand.
The focus there really is supporting Remington to grow the business. With growth, we believe that the margin will improve. I think linked to that is, as CP Kelco continues to improve their margins, CP Kelco is very well placed in Asia. That will also support the continued margin recovery in Asia-Pacific. Lucy.
Thank you, Damian McNeela from Deutsche Numis. My question is, is the revenue guidance ambitious enough? The reason I ask that is that two years ago, the guide was 4%-6%. You have delivered 5% over the last sort of five years. Since then, we have had a transformational acquisition in CP Kelco. We have seen the emergence of sort of anti-obesity medicine come through. We have still got the sort of sugar reduction opportunity.
What are the things that we should be thinking about in terms of Tate 's ability to really drive revenue growth from here?
This is the first time I've been asked a question like that, Damian. I mean, look, I think we've been very clear about what our commitment is over the next three to five years to get to the higher end of the 4%-6%. That requires us to grow ahead of the market. We're very confident in that. I think, would we love to do more? Of course we would. What would that look like? It would look like us doing what we're doing today really well as we put the two companies together, and also a significant shift in our view on the pace of reformulation, because I think it's going to grow over time.
We have talked about it in many different ways, questions about regulation. If that really kicks in, then I think we could see growth ahead of what we have stated in our medium-term financial growth algorithm. Of course, we will look to do more always. It will require that potential for reformulation to really accelerate. We know all the trends are there, but in the recent market environment, things have slowed down as we have dealt with all of these macro shocks, etc. Are we confident in what we have said? Yes. Do we think we could do more? Absolutely, if things play out the way we hope they will.
I think there is one right at the back, Lucy. Go on in the back.
Thank you. It is Andrew Ford from Peel Hunt. Thank you for the presentation. It was really informative and engaging.
I'm fairly new to the story, so forgive my ignorance. My first question follows, I think, Alex's. The macro trends in the sector have persisted for quite a long time. The growth in health and wellness, I guess, could manifest in a number of ways. Reformulation is obviously one, but there could also be a reversal in the technification of food, possibly. I know Clare sort of alluded to that and mentioned not all reformulations are the same, but I just wondered about the balance of the portfolio of highly artificial and non-functional relative to the more sort of natural and added functionality, sort of how, or if I'm looking at it the wrong way, if that's the wrong way to look at the portfolio.
No, I mean, I don't think it's a way to look at the portfolio.
I mean, we're very clear that we want to make nature-based solutions using science to continue to allow our customers to reformulate, to provide more natural, cleaner label, etc. We also have in our portfolio a very valuable franchise in sucralose, which is an artificial sweetener and very well-regulated, absolutely food-safe, and provides great taste, and is an important part of the portfolio. The vast majority of what we do comes from nature and is reformulated in a way that allows that to flow through to customers. There are some nuances in that because what's natural versus not depends on market by market, but we believe the portfolio is well-positioned for those trends.
I guess it's difficult to put a percentage on it, is what you're saying, but it'd be interesting to know either the headline numbers or relative to new product development, if that's changing at all.
Yeah. I mean, if you simply just strip sucralose out from the revenue, sucralose is a teen's part of the revenue now, isn't it? I hate to use the 80/20 rule because it's always very dangerous, but a high proportion of the portfolio does label in a very clean way for consumers and customers.
Thank you. Next question, just on R&D. That's sort of a really impressive number. I just wondered how that changes in a world of more direct customer relationships that you also mentioned in the presentation. Is it, are costs going to be shared more? Is there going to be more exclusive arrangements or any other, I guess, change in focus from a group level?
Look, I mean, I think fundamentally more direct customer relationships are very valuable because it allows you to build some of the, or build some of those characteristics that Veronica talked about earlier. I do not think it fundamentally changes how we think about investing in R&D or in customer-facing capability. Somebody asked a question about margin structure by region. One of the reasons that in Asia our margin structure is a bit lower is we have put a lot of commercial cost into Asia to accelerate growth. Five- seven years ago, we had a $100 million business there. We have got a $500 million business. We have got the capability there to grow to be much bigger because we have invested in physical infrastructure, in labs, in ALFIE, in people capability. We have a great base to grow off. I do not think more direct customer access means significantly added cost.
What it will mean is our ability to increasingly help them reformulate. It should accelerate, therefore, the solutions part of our business, which we know is more valuable, stickier, and builds better relationships.
Thank you. That's really helpful.
We've got a couple at the front here.
Thanks. It's Tom Horsey from Wellington. Just on the $3 billion opportunity for Tate as sugar loses market share, is that assuming sugar goes from 80%- 0% or 80%- 50% or something similar? If you look at the opportunity for pectin to take share from gelatin, I guess it's vegan and it's probably lower carbon. Has anyone scaled that kind of opportunity in terms of dollars?
I think Tate & Lyle seems for you. On sugar, if you remember, we said roughly 80% of the world's sweetening today is sugar. The non-sugar market is about $6 billion.
Right? So logically, therefore, you can figure out roughly what the portion is. We're not talking about sugar going to zero. We're talking about taking percentages off when you look at it. $3 billion will be roughly 10% if I get my maths right.
On the substitution, I would think I'd love to replace gelatin with pectin, but the beauty of it is that we have a portfolio. We win with carrageenan, we win with starches, we win with gellan gum or pectin in replacing gelatin. I mean, I think Veronica said it, gelatin is hard to replace for texture, for stability, for processes. Sometimes we have to take pectin. Sometimes we need to take another product. At the moment, we see a lot of growth for what we call gummies because producers want them to be vegan.
Therefore, they want to reformulate so that the main product is vegan and not using gelatin. Or they want them to be stable. Gelatin, as today, will melt if they are in a truck on the road. They want to be stable for normal distribution and supply chain, and they want them to be vegan. We see a lot of wins with that. In our portfolio, it would be either starches or pectin. We had a lot of growth in pectin. Part of what I was saying in the volume rebound and the volume leverage is coming from this reformulation. What the next one will be, it might be in desserts. It might be in soft capsules for nutrition. We are still using a lot of the gelatin. It will open up new opportunities and new systems for us.
One here, [audio distortion].
Thank you, Patrick Hagens from Goodbody. My first question is just around, I guess, commodity kind of supply chain shocks. I know today you mentioned in terms of pectin and how your integrated models kind of give you a competitive advantage to manage that. More generally, there are obviously supply chain shocks around cocoa, citrus, a host of commodities. How big of a driver for reformulation is that for your portfolio? I guess, how is your portfolio set up to play into that trend? My second question is just around the ALFIE system. Fascinating video. How much of your pipeline is being generated through that robotics today? What has to stop you scaling that kind of across more geographies and into sweeteners or fibers, etc.?
Let me take ALFIE first. We opened ALFIE in October last year.
We have been at it for six to nine months. It started with really characterizing ingredients so that we could formulate better. What we are now starting to see is significant customer interest and interaction with ALFIE, notably in Asia because obviously it is sitting in Singapore. We are starting to hold some pretty big sessions with customers on generating a pipeline as a result. They are fascinated by the ability to speed things up and to use the combination of AI that Victoria talked about to get to a more, if you like, a more accurate virtual sample. When you put it into ALFIE, it runs 10 times plus faster than doing a lab sample. The acceleration is almost off the charts. We will start to see it develop a stronger pipeline over the next few months, I suspect, as customers really start to interact with it, really.
We're starting to see some prototypes come off it now. We're only six to nine months in, but encouraging so far. On commodities, I would say commodity shocks are less of a driver of reformulation, but more a driver for us to create resilience. I'll give you a couple of examples. Stevia, very concentrated supply out of China. Climate shock in China on stevia is a big problem. Hence, the all North American supply chain we've created in partnership with Manus so that we've got stevia out of Latin America with U.S. manufacturing. Creating alternative supply options, which by the way help with geopolitics as well. Think about corn and that need to create a more resilient supply chain for corn because of some of the crop challenges we've seen. Three crop seasons ago, massive droughts in France, corn yields went down 30%.
We had to import non-GMO corn from the U.S. to serve our Europe business. That required regulatory approval in Holland to allow the non-GM corn to come in. Working on regenerative sustainable agriculture practices around the world is really important as well. As Sarah talked about a more resilient supply chain, that is resilience both from the fields and to where the manufacturing locations are. I think we'll see more diversification of raw material supply and also more local production over time as you see the world evolve. On citrus, by the way, we're actually a relatively low user of the overall total crop in Brazil. Because we're using effectively the waste stream, which is the peel, that is less of a concern for us. Because we've got such backwardly integrated relationships with some of the orange growers, we're pretty well established.
I want to add one point because those are the raw materials and the crops we're depending on for our manufacturing processes. You mentioned cocoa. That's opportunities for us because Bill and his team will go to customers and offer ways to actually cut down 20% of their usage by having solutions and building back the mouthfeel, the taste, the flavor profile so that they can decrease on that, being neutral for customers. Those disruptions in the market are also great opportunities for us to bring solutions.
Exactly right. Thank you.
I think we've got time for one last one.
I see one there, Chris. [crosstalk]. I think there were two, so.
Thank you, Chris Pitcher from Rothschild & Co Redburn again. It's three years almost today since you bought Quantum, and Dartree Fibers hasn't maybe become what you've hoped yet.
Can you talk a little bit on how that integration has gone, how the revenue synergies for their technologies have progressed? Is it still very much a Chinese business? And what learnings from that can you apply to the CPK synergy attempts?
If you remember when we first announced the Quantum transaction, it was very much a China for China logic. Fosun goes for the Chinese market, they were the leader. However, there is a big potential export opportunity as we've established that business as part of Tate & Lyle. I say, look, the integration has gone very well. Some of the learnings from that integration we did port across into the CP Kelco integration program, although it's much bigger scale and global and therefore required a lot more different thinking.
I think FOS and GOS will become more important for us outside China over time because of the accelerated interest in fiber and because FOS and GOS bring different functionalities to our corn fibers. They give us another weapon. I expect to see it as an important growth vector for us going forward. Thank you. I am being given the hook by Chris. Thank you all for spending so much time with us this afternoon. It was the first part of our Capital Markets event. The second part is in Denmark on Thursday. We were excited to show you the biggest pectin plant in Europe and really learn more about the functionality and versatility of pectin.
I hope you can see from the presentations today a fundamentally different business to the one I joined 10- 11 years ago and a business that really is well positioned to accelerate growth in a world where food is evolving very rapidly. We passionately believe that. I hope today gave you a much better idea of what the new business really is. For those of you online, thank you for joining us for the whole of the session. Sorry you could not be with us. For those of you in the room, we are very happy for you to join us for a drink upstairs. We can continue the conversation if you would like. We look forward to seeing at least some of you in Denmark on Thursday. Thank you very much.