All right. Good afternoon. Please take your seats. I would like to welcome back IFF to CAGNY. IFF is a global leader in high-value ingredients and solutions to the CPG industry. They partner with their customers to help build and deliver innovative solutions that win with the customers at the end of the day. I would like to come and welcome the newly appointed CFO, Michael DeVeau, President of Health & Biosciences, Simon Herriott, and Head of Investor Relations, Michael Bender. Please join me in welcoming IFF to the stage today.
Thanks, Steve, for the warm welcome, and it's great to be back at CAGNY. Sorry if the shine is bad on my head. I apologize for that in advance. Just, it's a good way to start. But before we start, cautionary statement: please take a look here very, very quickly at our non-GAAP financial measures. If you want more information, everything is in our press release that we filed on Tuesday as part of our earnings process. Very quickly, in terms of just the agenda, we have four kind of key areas that we want to address. I know many of you, I see familiar faces, know the IFF story very, very well. But for those who are new or interested, we want to provide some opportunities to give you a little bit of IFF at a glance. So that's point number one. Point number two, a quick financial recap.
Of course, this week we had earnings released on Tuesday, call yesterday so I'm going to do a quick recap of 2024 performance, 2025 outlook, but the main show really is to look at our biotech capabilities across our portfolio, which we believe is a competitive advantage. We brought Simon Herriott here, who leads our H&B Health & Biosciences unit, but he's going to go through in much, much more detail, starting from the infancies of what a probiotic enzyme culture is, all the way to what we're doing overall from an IFF standpoint, and then at the end, we'll take questions, and I went too fast so I'm going to go back. Okay, it worked so IFF, really, everything starts with us in terms of our purpose, right? Making joy through science, creativity, and heart.
Our commitment is to do everything in terms of a philosophy of do more good, which is really around good for people, good for planet. We're one of the biggest players within our industry: $11.5 billion in sales, $2.2 billion in EBITDA, which represents about 19% EBITDA margin. These are full-year 2024 numbers. One big common question that I get when we explain what we do, where we compete, how we play, is, "Hey, what products are yours?" Unfortunately, just given the relationships with our customers, it's very confidential, so we can't give specific brands. I will tell you two key facts, though. One, many of our customers are here presenting this week. So just to give you some of the innovations you've seen, IFF is a player in that, so we're a big component of that. And two, I'm not going to touch this anymore.
In two, in terms of category exposures, we highlighted about 12 elements here, just to give you some examples. Simon will go through the H&B side of it. I just want to hit up basically three, which I think are pretty impactful. One in four perfumes in the world were created by IFF. So most likely, you had a chance that over your life, you put on a perfume or cologne, IFF made it. I am not driving slides. I don't know what's happening with the slides. That is not me. The clicker is over there. One in two nutritional bars contain IFF's protein. So again, meaningful impact. And one in five, hard seltzers in North America, that's a shout-out to John Feeney here in the front row, is an IFF flavor.
So you can see more broadly our participation across HPC and personal care products is actually very, very strong. So how it all starts? Maybe I won't use slides. How it all starts really comes down to around our innovation and R&D. So people ask me, "Mike, how do you do it?" We spend a lot of money. We spend around $671 million in annual R&D spend per year, around 5.8%. Our infrastructure is very big in terms of innovation and R&D because it's the backbone and the lifeblood of our business. The way I think about R&D for us is the more R&D, the more differentiation. The more differentiation, the faster growth element of your business and the better return, i.e., margin. So super, super important.
You can see some of our networks here: 3,500, about 3,400 R&D employees, 8,000 patents, six master perfumers, big partnerships, and a big infrastructure to really drive our R&D overall. IFF has a unique capability. We look at it in two ways. There's a vertical of bioscience, and then there's a horizontal element. And so this is something that when we merged and did a combination with DuPont's Nutrition & Biosciences business, the foundational elements of enzymes, cultures, and probiotics came from that business. So we have a business, which is what Simon leads today. It's a more than $2 billion business. It's growing mid-single digits and has a 30% EBITDA margin business. So very, very, very good, very strong business. In addition to that, what we're trying to do is we're trying to leverage that biotech capability across the rest of our platform.
And so we see opportunities, and again, Simon will go through it in more details, Taste, and Scent. There's opportunities to leverage that biotech across all the businesses within IFF overall. What we do is we deploy our expansive R&D and innovation across our big network. Our network, we have 22,000 employees, 18,000 customers, 150 locations, servicing 175 countries around the world. So think of it as creation, R&D, spread globally here. So very, very strong network, and so we can deploy and scale very, very quickly. When you look at the business, it is highly diverse. And so just in these three elements here, when you look at it on a segment basis, in 2024, 50% or 51%, it's going to be on the Nourish side, 20% respectively, H&B and Scent, and about 10% is Pharma Solutions, which will actually leave the portfolio by the second quarter of 2025.
Really important by market, we have about 55% of our exposure to the developed markets. Why that's important is because as you think about the growth dynamics there, it's around innovation. It's around health and wellness, better-for-you products. Those are the growth drivers for us that are so important from our portfolio of R&D that we're deploying to those markets. On the emerging markets, this is the S curve, the rising middle-class consumption of packaged goods. We have very, very high exposure, long relationships, and long presence in those key markets. So we're well poised to capture that growth as well. When you look at it on a customer basis, basically it's a third, a third, a third. A third large, a third mid-size, a third small, including some private label. And so very, very well balanced.
When you think about the growth trajectory, if one is moving better than the other, we should capitalize that. It's also relatively balanced that we're a little bit resilient in terms of certain situations with different types of customers. New CEO started early in 2024. We created four kind of key strategic pillars or priorities for us. It's around people, customer, innovation, and operational excellence. For us, everything starts with innovation, innovation, and our people. IFF engaged and empowered people are super important. Those are the people that are taking the technologies and R&D and combining them together to make solutions for our customers. We need to have a really, really good, strong talent base. Paramount to our overall strategy. When you think about the customer element of it, it's really around customer centricity. You've got to have really strong relationships.
You need to know the brands really well. You need to provide the best service. You need to be the partner of choice. And so for us, it is really important for our businesses to really focus on the customer at the center of our strategy. Innovation, I've talked about. It's basically taking those technologies, creating solutions, and being that preferred partner for them by offering those solutions. And operational excellence, another key pillar. This is really around the status quo of safety, quality, reliability, but also continuous improvement, right? So we at IFF are really looking to drive productivity across our portfolio, across our network, to make sure two things. One, we have a competitive cost structure. Why that's important? So we can compete against our peers and make sure we're as relevant as we can be. And two, to reinvest in opportunities to continue to drive that innovation pipeline.
So very, very important there. Boiling down into the business unit strategies, each business now has end-to-end accountability. In 2024, we basically empowered the business models. So now Simon has full ownership of his entire P&L, soup to nuts. There's no more central functions besides some corporate elements of it. But finance, HR, operations, procurement, everything is going to be underneath the business president, which is really important in making sure we drive that accountability and execution as we go forward. With that, they've all developed their unique nuanced strategy with the umbrella of those four strategic pillars I talked about in the framework. In H&B, it's really around building leadership in R&D, probiotics, cultures, and enzymes. Simon will go through it in much more detail. But those are the key elements from an R&D standpoint.
At the same time, investing in capacity because at IFF, we have growth opportunities, but we need to make investments to make sure we can capture that growth with adequate capacity in key technologies. So really, really important overall in H&B. On the Scent side, it's about driving R&D innovation. If you followed the IFF story, you know it very well. Naturals, ingredients, and delivery systems. Those are the biggest drivers from a growth perspective within the Scent business. And then there's a category skew as well, which is really, there's really good accretive of categories like fine fragrance. It's one of our highest return ROIC businesses. And so we have the opportunity to deploy resources in key markets such as Africa, Middle East, China, again, to capture our fair share or even more of growth in that market. And it's accretive in terms of overall returns.
The blue box up top, as you can see, is what was originally Nourish in 2024, but it's now being separated. What's really important in this is there's two distinct different strategies that are happening with this business. So we felt by separating it, not only do you give the visibility and the accountability, you can customize your strategy to make it what's appropriate for those businesses. On the Taste side, it's really around driving some key tonalities, citrus, vanilla, the most common flavor technologies, but also driving modulation, which is a big platform for IFF that we have for many, many years. So think about sugar reduction, salt reduction, fat reduction, opportunities that we can drive R&D to make sure we can help our customers solve the needs of ultimately the consumers. In addition, there's some markets where we've been underpenetrated.
And so, we're making a focus now in the next three to five years is really to drive our penetration in private label and also in food service. And so, we've been under-indexed there, and this is an opportunity to make sure we put the resources in place to drive specifically in those opportunities because those are the categories right now that are growing the most. On the Food Ingredients side, it's a little bit more of a mixed story. And so, in that business, a couple of years ago, the margin of that was high-teens. And then, over the course of the last couple of years, excluding 2024, I'll come back to that, but the margin actually dropped down to high single digits. And so, we lost a big chunk of overall margin.
And so, really, from a fixed mentality, is how do we drive that margin back up towards the mid-teens? And it's coming in two different ways under new leadership that we have that was announced late last year in 2024. On the cost structure, it's about driving productivity within the plant and infrastructure as well as our raw material purchases. And so by optimizing the cost structure, we have significant opportunities to regain, recoup, and get some margin back. In addition, we want to make sure we emphasize some of the key core elements and can't just be a cost story. We need to make sure that we have the right supply, the right price, the right service level because we want to make sure we also grow that business to the best of our abilities overall.
Through the combination of that, we believe we can get to mid-teens EBITDA margin in the next foreseeable future, a couple of years. We had a really good progress in 2024. We basically went from high single digits to low double digits overall. So we've seen the margin expansion. Underpinning all this is really an emphasis on digital transformation. And so across the business, we're trying to use AI technology really to be more efficient to make sure we can increase speed, effectiveness, and driving some of those return elements that are super important to make sure we're getting the margin lift that we want to get from a business standpoint. Slides are dead again. I think my next slide, if I remember, there you go, is capital allocation.
So if we can do the business unit strategy correctly, it should lead to faster growth, margin expansion, and strong cash flow generation. We've announced starting in August of last year in our Q2 call, really we're going to increase the CapEx to about 6% of sales over the next three years. And that's around everything I talked about from an earnings call perspective, capacity expansion in H&B, some deferred maintenance catch-up in Food Ingredients, some commercial-facing creative centers in flavors and fragrances, and some digital transformation efforts in terms of an ERP uplift or technical upgrade. So we're working on that. That's the foundational piece of it. The other four pillars really are we have a commitment to be below three times net debt to EBITDA from a leverage standpoint.
We will get there, again, in the end of the second quarter here with the completion of our divestiture of our Pharma Solutions business. We will be below that target, so that will come, and then really it's about balancing two, three, and four under the best return profile that we have. We want to make sure we maintain our consistent dividend. Obviously, we've been in a divestiture mode, and so we continue to look at the portfolio to see if there's opportunities there, to see if we still want to monetize and move on some businesses that don't have a real strategic fit, but that's work underway. The far chunk is behind us, and then really start to emerge that once we get below our leverage target, we have opportunities to potentially pursue kind of value-added bolt-on opportunities really around R&D and technology solutions.
In addition, once we get below the three times, we have the opportunity to potentially restart our share buyback reauthorization. We did pause that over the last couple of years because our commitment to the rating agencies was to get below three times overall. So think of it as a combination of strong financial components of it with a very, very strong balanced capital allocation strategy should drive some pretty good return from a shareholder standpoint. Very quickly, because we had earnings yesterday, and I want Simon to have more time. 2024 was a good year. It was a good recovery year. 6% top-line growth, 16% comparable EBITDA growth, 210 basis points of margin expansion across the board, big volume recovery off of the prior year lows. And so a very, very good year.
At the same time, we made significant improvements to move our leverage from about 4.4 times, again, down to 3.8 where it is now. That was really driven by strong operational performance, right-sizing our dividend policy in Q1 of 2024, completing divestiture of cosmetic actives, and ultimately announcing the Pharma Divestiture that will come this year. In 2025, the environment still remains murky and it's dynamic, but we believe we still have the opportunity to have continued volume growth, building on the 6% that we had in 2024, somewhere between 1%-4% in 2025. This is entirely predominantly driven by volume improvements year- over- year across all of our businesses. When you combine that volume growth and leverage plus productivity, a focus on making sure we're as efficient as we can be, we will get leverage within the P&L.
So, on a currency-neutral basis, we expect comparable EBITDA to grow somewhere between 5% and 10%. And we're doing this while reinvesting significantly to make sure that we're driving future long-term sustainable profitable growth. And so, 2025, again, the way I would think about it is making sure we deliver strong performance at the same time, setting ourselves up appropriately for the future. And then again, at the end of the second quarter, we expect to be below our three times net debt to EBITDA. So very quickly, in summary for me, it's a great business. We got very, very good innovation, one of the best in the industry. We've seen really good performance in 2024, continuing performance in 2025 while still reinvesting for future growth and sustainable profitable growth. Clear prioritization in terms of strategy and capital allocation.
But single focus for us is to make sure we remain focused on execution. Execution from IFF is the name of the game at this point, and we need to make sure we deliver overall in terms of our financial commitments. And so really important and focused effort there. Now, with that as a high level, I'd like to introduce Simon, who will take you through the work we're doing on biotech.
Thank you, Mike, and good afternoon, everybody. My job this afternoon is to try and get you as excited about biotechnology, maybe not the biotechnology itself, but the potential that biotechnology has for IFF. As excited as I am, indeed, about it.
Simon Herriott, I've been President of Health and Biosciences, which was a division that we actually formed in DuPont in 2019 to collect together all of our biotechnology assets, which transferred with the N&B divestment to IFF in 2021. I've actually been involved in biotech now for about 10 or 11 years. And so having spent the first part of my career in chemicals and now working in biotech, the pace, the dynamism of the new product development that we're able to achieve is really astounding and is still one of the sort of highlights of the time that I've spent. So today, I have the opportunity to share what I think is a distinctive differentiated business capability that distinguishes IFF from most of its peers.
Our biotech capability comes from the combined heritage of four great science companies: Genencor, IFF, Danisco, Danish food company that DuPont acquired in 2011, and DuPont themselves. There's an awful lot of milestones on this chart, but there's probably three that I think resonate today and are vital and critical to what we do. The first, if you go back to the early 1980s, was when Genencor laid down some of their original patents in protein engineering. That is the foundation of today's IFF world-class enzymes business. The second, and this is one innovation that I'm immensely proud of, is that two gentlemen, one of whom is still working in our labs today in France, Philippe Horvath, identified CRISPR immunity. This is the immunity by which bacterial cells protect themselves against viral phage attack. They saw it in the humble yogurt.
But many of you will now know about CRISPR-Cas9 and its potential application across a wide variety of human health sciences. But we still practice it today, and it is critical in the way in which we develop our products. And thirdly is DuPont's heritage in material science and applications expertise. It is not enough to be able to have a fabulous discovery engine in biotechnology. You have to be able to apply it, and DuPont had that capability. Our brag sheet, likely you may have had some yogurt with our ingredients for breakfast this morning. Maybe you ate some baked goods or some chicken at lunchtime, and maybe the beer hasn't started just yet, but later on this evening, you may have a glass of beer that is actually facilitated or achieved through the use of some of our products.
The most important tile on this slide, however, is the five and a half thousand patents that are at the core of our bioscience portfolio. Like many ingredients, our products are ubiquitous. But unlike some, bioscience provides products not only with superior performance, but are also healthy for those that consume them and for our planet. We're committed to science. We have to put back an investment every year to achieve a multi-generational R&D pipeline. And I'll give you some insights into our future pipeline later in the presentation. We put back around 9%, and through that 9% of sales that we put back into R&D, we've developed one of the world's largest banks of microbial strains and protein sequences protected by these patents. Little definitional work. Most people talk about biotechnology, the use and engineering of organisms to make products and improve processes.
We at IFF like to talk about bioscience. And indeed, a shameless plug, you can follow our progress at bioscience@iff, our LinkedIn channel. And we use this because we don't just use microorganisms to design our products, but also to explore the relationship with the plants and the crop science that make up the naturals business that is so fundamental to flavors and fragrances. Indeed, in the first few months after we came into IFF, I received into our labs the opportunity to explore the genotypes of orris roots to improve their yield in this valuable scent crop, looking at macro plant organisms and the specific genotypes that give the best yield. More than 90% of health and biosciences businesses made up of three primary technology platforms in which we are either number one or number two in the world.
As we will see, understanding the specific application of each enzyme or probiotic or culture is so important that that's the way we organize our businesses. So under health and biosciences, I have a business specializing in home and personal care, another business specializing in food, another one specializing in health, et cetera. But all of them leverage our deep understanding of these three technologies: enzymes, which are proteins found in nature that speed up reactions, probiotics, which is the whole cell live microbes that benefit humans and animals, and then live bacterial cultures that are used in many of the dairy products that you know and love. Biotechnology is a powerful tool. It creates enormous excitement. But it turns out, particularly in non-pharmaceutical applications, that success can be elusive, even for the best-funded ventures or businesses.
There may be more, but after many years of observation, my belief is that there are three distinctive core capabilities that IFF and very few others are fortunate to have. The first is discovery. This is the ability, this cartoon represents the journey from discovering microbes in nature that, say, live in hot water and might be good for laundry, or that live in a healthy human or animal gut, and with their isolation, with their screening, engineering, scaling, and launch, we're able to bring products to market. That process is sort of step one. Remarkably, we're even able to design and teach microbes to express small chemical molecules such as scent and flavor molecules, and that's the middle panel on this cartoon, so step one, discovery. Step two, scale. Taking biotech to scale at viable cost and viable capital expense is a core skill.
You will have seen in our earnings yesterday that we intend to reinvest some more money in CapEx in this business, and it is essential to fund both the growth of the business and also the introduction of new technologies. We actually often speak of each microbial cell being its own tiny little factory, but fermenting these cells in their trillions in huge sophisticated vessels, the height of a four-story building, requires a capability in bioengineering that is pretty unusual, and third, to be valuable to our customers, our technologies have to work in their formulations. I'm fortunate in our team to have master brewers, master bakers, cheese makers, detergent formulators, all on our team to specify the R&D targets, the needs of our customers that we have to put back into our pipeline, and then to shepherd them to commercial success. If we're successful, bioscience is incredibly impactful.
At a macro level, we can achieve sustainable manufacturing, reducing waste, upscaling some of that, or upcycling some of that waste into useful products, reducing pollution, et cetera. Really, I see three primary value propositions. Number one, we're the active ingredient that leads to the customer's claim. Number two, we're catalysts that improve yield, reduce cost of our customers' processes. And number three, we reduce risk through reducing environmental impact. Whichever it is, one, two, or all three, we're always strategically important to our customers. We're also well-positioned for the future. We're aligned with two major consumer megatrends in health and well-being and in cleaning and hygiene, and two big societal trends around sustainability and the expanding middle class. I've referenced our competitive strength as number one or number two in all of our specific biotechnology markets already.
But we're also relatively unique in having the potential to leverage this technology base into our leading and high-value flavors and fragrance business. Our H&B business, therefore, operates not just as a world-leading bioscience business in its own right, but as an incubator for new technologies in Scent, in Food Ingredients, and in Taste. A little insight into the future. Of course, we have to convert the promise of this technology into tangible innovation opportunities. There are eight on this particular chart, but when I look at them, they are characterized by a couple of things. At our core, in the core of our business, we are being asked for colder, quicker, shorter laundry cycles. We're being asked for better performance in dishwashing. We're achieving process improvements in dairy cheese making, for example, and in fuel ethanol.
But we also have the capability to bring forward transformative innovations that open new markets for us. I'm going to speak a little bit more about one of our very exciting projects around biodegradable high-performance polymers and about enhanced probiotics. And last year, we achieved the first EPA approval of a biofungicide for crops. So three examples to give you. The first, TexStar. TexStar is part of a remarkable class of enzymes that both reduce the sugar in food, but in doing so, convert it into fiber while retaining texture, mouthfeel, and taste. This achieves multiple things at the same time: makes the food healthier, but also achieves cost reduction and achieves texture, mouthfeel, and other applications. Second, probiotics for years and years have mostly depended on strains with health benefits that have been isolated from dairy products.
But increasingly, through studying the human microbiome, we're able to identify organisms that thrive in a healthy human gut and influence many different health outcomes. The problem is they are really hard to make. But IFF can do it. So we are working on the next generation of probiotics, largely anaerobes. That means they don't survive in oxygen, but they thrive in the gut, and they have a tremendous potential for human health. And thirdly, a project that we've been working on for some years, a really astonishing multi-year innovation project to develop new polymers taking sugar and enzymes. Naturally biodegradable, by engineering the enzyme, we can build a whole platform of new high-performance ingredients for our core markets. We launched last year. We will launch with another customer this year.
We're actually seeing this in tangible sales that are coming through in the organization over the next five years. We're also accelerating the application of bioscience in both our food and beverage markets and in Scent. Whether it is in taste modulation, clean labels, sugar reduction, or on the Scent side, it is in providing sustainable ingredients for our fragrance business, which are biorenewable, biodegradable, using enzymatic and fermented upcycling. We are increasingly incubating the possibilities and the potential of biotechnology across the other divisions of IFF. To facilitate healthy growth of the business and to invest in these new technologies, we are accelerating capital investment to ensure readiness to take these opportunities in a modern fleet of platform assets. The beauty of these biotechnology assets is that they can be used for multiple products. They have a great deal of flexibility.
But with the growth that we saw, and in many categories, we saw double-digit growth last year, we need the capacity to be able to continue to grow and develop the business for the future. So in conclusion, we look at Bioscience not just for life, but being for a great potential for IFF. Creating superior products, number one, that improve performance either in use or in product yield. Two, reducing environmental impact for healthier people, animals, and planet. Thirdly, advancing a robust innovation pipeline to meet our customers' needs. We have a world-class position in scaling from lab to commercial production and application globally. We are investing in Bioscience to lead market differentiation. And finally, I'd like to commend to all of you, this is a great business for the present and the future at the heart of the modern IFF. Thank you.
Great.
Happy to open up the Q&A to the crowd. No question. Here you go, Lauren.
Thank you. So, remedial version, as much as you boil down the science the way that we can all sort of understand it, I think. But I want to try to put some of those innovations maybe in context of scale and commercial. I mean, commercial potential is always very big, right? But there have been things in the past with IFF and things that were on your slide, like the Vanillin, that were like, "This is the next big thing," and then it kind of wasn't the next big thing. So I don't know, is there anything perhaps you can look back? I'm thinking about encapsulation, like in the mid-80s that was a multi-year platform, and IFF had a considerable time lead on.
So maybe the six things that you kind of went through, however you want to approach this, but that's what I'm looking to try to understand better.
Yeah. So I'll start with that. That's why Laura and I distinguish between core innovation and transformative innovation. The reality of our business is that we're on a multi-generational product development. And in fact, we have to bring new products to market in order to retain superiority. To do that, our average cycle is something like three to five years. And so to sustain this business at mid-single-digit growth, and you can look at that across a $200 billion business and say, "This is the increment that I get from innovation in the core," that can allow you to sort of size the significance of those core innovations.
What we are excited about is the transformative ones that I mentioned earlier, because that allows us to approach new markets altogether. When I look at my strategy, obviously, we want to grow with the markets that we're in, gain market share, but we also have this opportunity to disrupt incumbents in other markets altogether. The polymer market that I referred to is about, in total market addressable size, $4 billion. Now, taking a substantial share of that will take a great deal of time, so I'm not making promises with regard to the percentage share, but it is a very significant opportunity and allows us to sort of change the business in the future.
I think being able to, and I'm just giving you an order of magnitude, we probably put two-thirds of our R&D resource goes back into the core, and the other third goes into adjacent and transformative opportunities, because we know that to invest in those could really supercharge our growth.
Yes, right here.
Thank you. Bryan Spillane, Bank of America. So, two questions. One, can we talk a little bit about, I think you've identified private label and food service as an opportunity? So can we talk a little bit about that, the penetration, and what's the opportunity? Is it focus? Is it offering different ingredients? Just kind of what differentiates that you'll be able to increase that penetration?
Yeah, Bryan, it's a great question. For us, legacy IFF, when you look at that market on the Taste side, it wasn't a big focal point for us.
We were much stronger with the global multinational players and some of the regional players, and so when you look specifically into private label, it was underpenetrated. We went and we purchased a company called by the name David Michael and Ottens back in 2015, which really gave us a platform in the U.S. to start to penetrate private label. The reality was, in terms of emphasis and focus from the team, still wasn't there. Under new leadership with Yuvraj leading it, he's now focused on that, and it's an area that it's really around making sure you have the right commercial engagement and approach from the commercial team, but also your manufacturing footprint needs to be conducive to smaller batch size, quicker speed, things to that nature, so his team is building on that piece of it, and they're driving that pretty hard.
So that's a key part of the Taste strategy going forward.
How big can you size it? Michael, just how big it may could be and what it is now? Is it big enough to move the needle like that?
I think it's big enough to move the needle in the sense of the growth rate opportunity within the T aste size. If I think about our market share position within private label, it's probably less than 5%. And you think about our broader market share, it's somewhere around 16%-17%. So there is a big opportunity in terms of where we play for it to actually grow as we go forward. And then the second, just on probiotics, prebiotics, they're showing up in a lot of allegedly it's in here, right?
I hope more than I like to see.
That's how would I know.
How do you feel?
Steve, hold on. But I guess my question is, and maybe this is completely, and Lauren gave us the overview of this is like remedial sort of science here, but can it live? In some, how do you make it stable, right? This can is cold right now, but maybe it sat in the back of the truck and it was 80-degree day or it froze because it was cold. Just A, is that difficult to do? And B, assuming that these types of products become, there's more demand or there's protein and everything, people are going to expect to have prebiotics and probiotics in a lot of things. Is that nascent? Is there an opportunity for that to get big? And again, is it possible that there are already, that it died, the bug?
Yeah, it's a great question.
It is the big challenge in probiotics development and in probiotics use, and we achieve success in that challenge in a couple of ways. I've got microphone issues here. First is strain selection. We want to find strains that are robust. I just spoke about some that are actually very difficult to deal with. The second is, how do you treat the strains once you have grown them and isolated them, and so we use a lot of freeze-drying capability to get them to a place where they are stable in the product. If you buy the capsules in your local drugstore, those products are sort of guaranteed to meet the product label requirements on them.
And then, thirdly, particular challenge is when you're including it in food and beverage matrices: is how do you keep it stable in the context of all of those other ingredients that are in that matrix? So we work extensively on that. And I spoke a little bit about that application's capability to be able to stabilize and ensure that they are effective. What I work all the time with my regulatory team and our quality team to ensure that what our customer says on the label, that you have so many billion CFUs of probiotics available in the packet, they are genuinely there. And that is the piece that is essentially the skill that we have to apply in making sure that they're successful. Yeah. So we are in, but so the question was, how do I ensure that they're alive? Well, we test them, right?
And so we do extensive testing to ensure that they are alive. And then when we say you've got X billion CFUs, you really have X billion CFUs, colony-forming units, essentially live and viable probiotics in there, and that when you consume them, they'll make it into your body.
Yes. Two questions I think might be related. There's always been an inherent tension, Mike, in this business between returns and the creativity and capabilities that your team has. And years ago, I know you did an excellent job managing those returns, changing those returns. If you comment a little bit about the return disciplines that are in place right now, if any of that's changing, or how you think about returns on investment capital as you serve these different kinds of clients, I know that's been a source of opportunity in the past.
And second, maybe related is, you mentioned you have the bulk of your divestitures behind you. How are you thinking about? I think you made a comment, things that aren't critical or don't overlap with your key capabilities. How are you thinking about what to divest and what not to divest? What guidelines would you use to make those decisions? Thank you.
Yeah, it's a great question. And I think the return philosophy is an important part of that, John. And so IFF, legacy IFF was very, very good between 2010 and 2015 of making strategic choices, region, category, customer, in terms of what are the best investments that we're going to make to drive a return on each one of those choices, put it simply put. Over the last couple of years, we've been very focused on inorganic growth. And so we drove to see we built a platform.
It's been really, really a focus around expansion of the business overall, not necessarily the best thing in terms of return from where we are relative to what we thought we would be. And so what we're trying to do now is to get back a little bit more to basics. And so you hear Erik talk about that. That basic concept is to making sure we put much more discipline in the investments and the choices that we make. And so each one of the business unit teams, whether you're looking at it from a CapEx perspective, a potential OpEx investment, or an M&A investment, it's going to be triangulated based on the same methodology to making sure you're picking the ones that have the highest return profiles. And so Simon's did it with part of his investments, and he talked about some of them.
If you want to comment on that, feel free.
Yeah. I mean, I think it's also about applying project-by-project discipline to understanding how you're looking at risk in the context of the capital investments you're making and the technologies that we're bringing to market. And clearly, when you're bringing transformative, new-to-the-world processes, new-to-the-world engineering, new-to-the-world products, there's a higher return necessary in order to ensure that you sustain those kinds of investments. And so we look at all of our capital investments through that lens. I'm pretty confident when we invest in another enzyme plant or another probiotic plant that assuming the demand growth is there, we'll get a great return on that investment. When it comes to transformative ones, we have to do a lot more due diligence, and that's what we've been doing. So I think it's also about the risk profile of the projects as well.
Yeah.
In terms of the divestiture question, maybe just to clarify, what I meant to say was the bulk of the work is done in terms of the Pharma piece. We had Microbial Control growth, Lucas Meyer Cosmetics. So there's been a divestiture component of the IFF story over the last couple of years. Once we're done with Pharma, it's no longer around a capital structure question to getting the net debt to EBITDA piece of it. It's really then becoming strategic fit and what we can do in terms of helping overall returns of the business. There's clearly some parts of the portfolio when you look at that there's opportunities to specifically improve. We're going through that process right now. We still think there's a lot of recovery that we can make in some of those businesses.
But ultimately, as we go through that, simultaneously, we're evaluating those incremental opportunities in terms of divestiture. More to come. It's too early at this point in time, but that's something we're thinking through.
One last call. Thank you very much, everyone.
Thank you.