Biscuits, gummies and seaweed: the Tate & Lyle boss who's moved on from sugar

The Guardian

28-01-2025

A plate of Rich Tea biscuits is prominently placed in the centre of the table as Tate & Lyle chief executive Nick Hampton sits down at its swish London headquarters.
His 104-year-old company's name may be synonymous with the sugar – and Golden Syrup – found on supermarket shelves, but Hampton has had a different part to play in creating one of the nation's favourite dunkers. Tate & Lyle creates a plethora of ingredients which offer an alternative to that sweet stuff – including extra fibre and sugar replacement in the biscuits.
Hampton's business has existed in its current form since 2010, when its sugar arm – now known as Tate & Lyle Sugars – was sold off to American Sugar Refining for £211m, while his business remained listed on the stock market.
In fact, it is the only member of the original FT-30 group of listed companies, created in 1935, still on the London stock market. 'Part of the reason for that is nothing we do today we did more than 30 years ago,' says Hampton of the business, which was formed in 1921 from a merger of two rival sugar refiners. Its origins stretch back even ­further, to a sugar refiner on Liverpool docks in 1859.
Hampton, a slick executive who spent more than nine years at PepsiCo after a stint at management consultancy Monitor, has been at the helm for nearly seven years. He is continuing to transform the business to provide alternatives to sugar, which is being taxed and blamed in part for the UK's obesity crisis.
The group sources raw foodstuffs from around the world, and creates ingredients designed to offer crunch or creaminess, add fibre, or a give a sweet taste to foodstuffs without the attendant calories. They originate from the likes of corn, tapioca, seaweed, stevia leaf and citrus peel.
The group's low- and no-calorie sweeteners and fibre additives have helped remove more than 9m tonnes of sugar from people's diets since 2020, equivalent to 36 trillion calories, he says.
Tate & Lyle is reformulating gummies – so children can be persuaded to take vitamins without adding sugar or gelatin – and helping make dairy-free ice-cream and crunchy, healthier biscuits.
Aside from the work on Rich Tea, the group has helped reinvent McVitie's digestive biscuits and – less successfully – produce a low-sugar version of Cadbury's Dairy Milk, as well as many more projects it is shy about revealing.
Tate & Lyle describes itself as an expert in sweetening, fortification and 'mouthfeel' – a rather off-putting word for what makes up over half the group's business, which is making things seem crunchy or creamy without high-calorie ingredients.
Hampton has been busy since taking charge. He sold off a controlling stake in its US-based commercial sweeteners division in a $1.3bn deal in 2021, and last year acquired CP Kelco, a US producer of pectin and speciality gums, for $1.8bn. The blockbuster deal made Tate & Lyle one of the few listed British firms to acquire an American business, rather than accept a takeover from a buyer across the Atlantic.
'We've streamlined it down to a much simpler business focused in where food is going to grow,' says Hampton. 'We now need to execute on that strategy with real conviction and deliver on the growth potential.'
Despite his efforts, Tate & Lyle's share price is loitering not far from the level it was at when Hampton took the reins, prompting rumours of an opportunistic bid from US private equity firm Advent late last year. A firm bid for the company – which is valued at £2.8bn – has not materialised but Hampton says the talk was 'a sign of the potential the business has', which makes him 'very determined to unlock the value' in Tate & Lyle.
The share price remains depressed as investors wonder if the company may yet be flogging ingredients that are falling out of fashion, despite the rise of weight loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy. Meanwhile, concerns have been raised about ultra-processed foods – found in everything from breakfast cereals to ready meals and containing a long list of unusual ingredients, linking them to poor health.
Hampton gives the idea short shrift. 'The concern about ultra-processed food and its labelling is an opportunity for us, because the issue with lots of ultra-processed food is its nutritional content. It tends to be high in sugar and fat and things that maybe don't create balancing diets.'
He says consumers may want a 'clean label' but their priority is more nutritious, tasty and affordable food, with concerns about unusual ingredients further down the list.
Tate & Lyle's entire portfolio of ingredients stems from plants, meaning securing supplies in the face of the climate crisis and geopolitical stresses is far from guaranteed. Two years ago, for example, production of the particular type of corn it requires was down 30% in Europe, so supplies had to be shipped in from the US. Meanwhile, production of stevia in China, once Tate & Lyle's only source of the sweetening leaf, was hit by flooding.
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Now, given a combination of potential US tariffs on Chinese goods under the Trump ­presidency and the need for climate resilience, it is hunting for multiple locations to source and manufacture goods to manage potential shifts in trade, he says. It has signed an agreement to source stevia from Latin America that will be processed in the US.
Regarding Trump, Hampton says the group is aiming to 'maintain that flexibility in the supply chain as things evolve'.
'We saw that in 2016 … there was a similar kind of challenge, and we navigated that pretty well.'
Despite its London listing, Tate & Lyle is hardly a British company. None of its innovation labs are in the UK, and just 350 of its 3,300 staff worldwide are British-based – at its head office and a facility making powdered food stabiliser in Mold, north Wales.
Hampton says the company is committed to remaining in the UK: 'We want our innovation centres to be close to where our customers are as food is inherently regional in nature, because of different tastes and regulatory environments.'
While the deal to sell the sugar business was 15 years ago, the Tate & Lyle name has historic associations with the slave trade on which the sugar industry was once based. Founders Henry Tate and Abram Lyle were just boys when the Slavery Abolition Act was passed but it is thought likely their business did have links to the trade.
Hampton says he considered changing Tate & Lyle's name after the CP Kelco deal, but did not want to lose the brand recognition outside the UK with clients and its history of improving nutrition.
'There's a huge amount of pride in the heritage of the business,' he adds. 'The name is really powerful for us and talks about the future our business, not the past. It's probably only in the UK where there's that sense of legacy on the shelves.'
Age 57Family Married, three grown-up daughters, two dogs.Education Reading School; MA in chemistry at St John's College, Oxford.Pay Fixed pay of £848,000, plus variable pay of £1.74m.Last holiday Portugal.Best advice he's been given 'Three values instilled by my parents. (1) Treat others as you'd like to be treated; (2) whatever you choose to devote your energy to, give it your best; (3) put family first.'Biggest regret 'Probably struggling consistently to put the family first.'Phrases he overuses 'There are three things …'How he relaxes 'Three things! (1) Exercise - I'm an obsessive runner and have recently discovered pilates; (2) playing (only golf now) and watching sport; (3) family – happily, we still see a lot of the girls.'