Tate & Lyle is a UK-based global food and beverage ingredients company specializing in sweetening, mouthfeel, fortification and other ingredient solutions. It supplies food and beverage manufacturers with ingredients used to improve taste, texture, nutrition and functionality across a wide range of products.
Long before prevention and metabolic health became central to healthcare, you had already built your career in nutrition science. What drew you to the field?
I absolutely love working in nutrition. I was influenced heavily by my background. My mother was a home economics teacher, so we always had magazines sitting around the house relating to food. Consequently, I did a degree and a PhD in nutrition back in the 1990s.
Then I moved into the food industry, so I’m 30-plus years working in the industry. I’m a really big believer that we need nutritionists to improve the product profiles we’re putting into the hands of consumers and help them affect their health by what they can choose on the shelves.
When you started your career, dietary guidance was largely based on population-wide recommendations such as the food pyramid and five-a-day. What has driven the shift towards a much more personalised understanding of nutrition?
Total diet is still what really matters for all of us. Don’t get hung up on single eating occasions or single foods, because we’re in it for a lifetime. Eating a healthy diet is a marathon, not a sprint. The fundamentals have stayed true: the balance of intake versus output, exercise and nutrition, and maintaining a healthy body weight.
But since I graduated, we have discovered the human genome, and that is having a massive impact on personalised nutrition. We know much more about how particular nutrients affect our genetic makeup and phenotype, and that we respond differently according to who we are. Food technology has moved on enormously as well. Food science has enabled us to improve the nutritional profile of foods while making them taste fantastic. We’re not there yet with personalised nutrition, but there’s some really interesting developing data.
Fiber has long been part of dietary advice, yet most people still aren’t consuming enough. Why do you see it as such an important opportunity for metabolic and public health today?
Fiber is probably the greatest underutilized resource in our diets. We’re thinking about heart health, bone health, even brain and cognition, and fiber can help many of those systems. It feeds the friendly gut bacteria, with links to improved bone health, cognition and blood glucose control. Increasing fiber intakes could be a major unlock for public health.
People used to think of high-fiber products as brown and chewy. That’s so out of date. Now we can fortify with fiber with no impact on taste, while ensuring the mouthfeel and texture are great. Data from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey in the UK and NHANES in the US shows a vast gap between how much fiber people are eating and what they’re recommended to eat. Filling that fiber gap purely with whole foods is very difficult, which is why fiber fortified foods come alongside as another solution.
GLP-1 medicines are changing the conversation around weight and nutrition. As food intake decreases, how are the needs of these consumers changing the way you think about food formulation?
We’ve done proprietary consumer research on GLP-1 consumers, and the number one need is nutrition quality. As food intake decreases, nutrient density becomes increasingly important because each bit they’re consuming needs to count. That means not only protein and fiber, but critical vitamins and minerals. Fortification is going to be key to ensuring foods can meet those needs.
Protein has become the expectation, but fiber is the differentiator. Current GLP-1 users, on average, have less than 14 grams of fiber a day, compared with 16 grams in the general US population versus the recommended 25 to 30 grams. There’s also an appreciation for fiber diversity. You’ve probably come across “fiber maxing”; I prefer “fiber mixing,” because diversity is key. It’s not just about soluble or insoluble fiber, but having a really good mix.
There is a lot of noise around nutrition and GLP-1s, and complex science can easily become oversimplified. How do you make sure the conversation remains grounded in evidence?
Having spent a career bridging science and marketing, the need for good science is really critical to build trust. Fiber maxing is a good example. Eat more? Absolutely. Eat excessively? No, probably not. We have this tendency, if we’re not careful, to go excessive on every message. We need to ground our communications in high-quality science.
It’s really important to me as the head of global nutrition and health science that we fund studies that prove the efficacy of our ingredients before we say anything about them. We fund studies with independent academics and ensure they’re published in peer-reviewed journals. If I use one of our soluble fibers, PROMITOR, as an example, we’ve got over 20 studies looking at its efficacy, from beneficially altering gut bacteria and cognitive health benefits to improving sleep quality and bone health. There’s so much more to fiber than the digestive benefit we automatically think of.
Tate & Lyle has spent many years reformulating foods to reduce sugar and calories while increasing fiber and protein. Where is the company focusing its innovation today, particularly as the use of GLP-1 medicines grows?
Our focus on reformulation doesn’t change. But with the increase in the use of GLP-1 drugs, our innovation is increasingly looking at that space. We have invested in research specifically on consumers using GLP-1 drugs because their needs are unique and they’re now a significant part of the population. A lot of what we’re learning from GLP-1 users is also relevant to the wider population: hydration, satiety and nutrient density are important for all of us.
Where I get quite excited is the enormous amount of data we have around what we call mouthfeel — texture, taste and how we appreciate foods. Through combinations of fibers, sweeteners, hydrocolloids, pectins, gels and gums, we can improve mouthfeel as well as nutritional content. That’s a real sweet spot because we need consumers to like and come back for those healthier products in the long term.
How would you summarise Tate & Lyle’s role in making better nutrition accessible without requiring consumers to fundamentally change the foods they eat?
Tate & Lyle is all about making healthy food tastier and tasty food healthier. Getting people to change their behavior is difficult, especially to sustain that behavior change, so we look at how we canfibre fortify everyday foods that people already put in their shopping trolley, whether that’s a pizza crust, popcorn or juice.
We absolutely want people to eat fruit, pulses and other naturally fiber-rich foods, but there’s also an opportunity to fortify everyday foods without changing the taste. In terms of closing that fiber gap, we need solutions that are accessible and built into consumers’ everyday diets, and that’s where fiber fortification can really help.
