Cost optimization in beverages: Tate & Lyle develops new sugar reduction concepts

Lille, France - Tate & Lyle, a leading global provider of innovative food ingredients and solutions, has launched new beverage prototypes as part of its OPTIMIZE™ offer. Tate & Lyle’s global optimisation service, OPTIMIZE™, helps food manufacturers to formulate food and drinks recipes which cost less but retain their original taste.

Pomegranate-grape juice drink One of the new additions to the offer is a pomegranate-grape juice drink. With this newly reformulated product, Tate & Lyle has reduced the sugar content by up to 45%, using a blend of sweeteners to retain the drink’s original taste and sweetness profile. Importantly the prototype delivers significant sweetener cost savings, while also reducing calories by 45%. This combination gives manufacturers the opportunity to replace traditional full-sugar drinks with a lower cost, lower in calorie alternative.

Tate & Lyle has a complete portfolio of OPTIMIZE™ beverage concepts which includes juice drinks and carbonated soft drinks with different flavours, as well as tea flavoured drinks and flavoured waters. These are examples of the potential benefits of recipe reformulation for both food manufacturers and their customers. With commodity prices soaring, these sugar reduction concepts offer manufacturers a way to cut costs, while meeting consumer demand for products with improved nutritional profiles.

Paul Cornillon, Vice President, Global Applications, Tate & Lyle Specialty Food Ingredients, explains: “Our goal is to help our customers face the challenges the markets throw at them. With commodity prices soaring and consumers becoming increasingly cost and health conscious, manufacturers are finding it more challenging than ever before to maintain profitability. The pressure on margins is such that manufacturers need to step up their reformulation efforts - this new product shows what can be achieved.”

OPTIMIZE™ beverage concepts are either formulated with SPLENDA® Sucralose or with a combination of SPLENDA® Sucralose and FRUCTOPURETM Fructose. Reformulations with these ingredients have already proven successful in the marketplace: globally, between 2007 and 2010, new launches of beverage products containing sucralose increased by 21%, while new launches of beverages containing sucralose and fructose rose by 30% (source: Mintel GNPD).

Notes to Editors:

SPLENDA® Sucralose has been successfully used as a single sweetener for sugar optimisation, reducing sugar levels by 30%. This no-calorie, intense sweetener, has an unmatched sugar-like taste and sweetness profile, and is extremely stable. Combined with FRUCTOPURE™ Fructose, it provides high quality stable sweetener systems with a higher reduction in overall sweetener levels, as FRUCTOPURE™ Fructose and SPLENDA® Sucralose have very complementary sweetness profiles and are synergistic.


About Tate & Lyle:

Tate & Lyle is a global provider of ingredients and solutions to the food, beverage and other industries, operating from over 30 production facilities around the world. Through our large-scale, efficient manufacturing plants, we turn raw materials into distinctive, high quality ingredients for our customers. Our ingredients and solutions add taste, texture, nutrition and increased functionality to products that millions of people around the world use or consume every day.

Tate & Lyle’s range of leading branded food ingredients includes SPLENDA® Sucralose, PROMITOR™ Dietary Fiber and STA-LITE® Polydextrose. Tate & Lyle also produces branded industrial ingredients including Bio-PDO™, Ethylex® and Sta-Lok® paper starches; and staple ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup, ethanol, citric acid and basic starches. In addition to providing a wide range of ingredients our Innovation and Commercial Development Group supports customers by providing product development, technical advice and proprietary consumer insight studies.

Tate & Lyle is listed on the London Stock Exchange under the symbol TATE.L. American Depositary Receipts trade under TATYY. In the year to 31 March 2010, Tate & Lyle employed 5,666 people in its subsidiaries and joint ventures, and sales totalled £3.50 billion. http://www.tateandlyle.com.

SPLENDA® is a trademark of McNeil Nutritionals, LLC