Tate & Lyle: Sowing Sustainability in Supply Chains

Nobody wants to eat runny mayonnaise, brittle ice cream or separated soup. 

Tate & Lyle is a global provider of food and beverage ingredients and solutions that can help to solve these challenges and create healthier food choices. The company transforms raw materials like corn and stevia into ingredients that add taste, texture and nutrients to all sorts of food and beverage products.

Such a wide range of ingredients, and their worldwide use, creates complex supply chains for the company. Scope 3 is by far the largest area of its emissions, but is also where Tate & Lyle has enormous potential to do sustainable good. 

Anna Pierce is Tate & Lyle’s Director of Sustainability, responsible for developing and running sustainability programmes that match the company’s ambitions and help its customers to achieve their ESG goals. 

Anna speaks to Sustainability Magazine about how the company is embedding sustainability throughout its supply chains.

What does sustainability mean to Tate & Lyle?

Tate & Lyle is a purpose-driven organisation and we have three pillars of purpose: 

• The first is providing healthier ingredients and options for our consumers 
• The second is building thriving communities where we live and work, and certainly within our supply chain
• The last pillar is caring for our planet, which is our encompassing programme of sustainability. 

When we talk about purpose over the last five years, we've really seen a cultural maturity and change within Tate & Lyle. It is fully embedded in everything we do, from thinking about our procurement processes to working with customers on new product developments. It has become a very integral part to the way that we operate and grow the company.

How does Tate & Lyle approach ethical sourcing?

From a supply chain perspective at large, when you think about ethical sourcing, it's not just thinking about the impact of the employees that are working for our supplier sites. We do go through site audits with suppliers and our supplier audit programme manages them to our ethical sourcing expectations, then follows up on any action items from those audits with our suppliers. 

I think it goes so much further than that. It's not just about if you are complying with local regulations and meeting expectations, it's looking at what the impact those businesses really are having on their community at large. That's where it starts to fold into our sustainability programme.

We have ESG in the terms and conditions of all of our supplier agreements. It is part of the way that we do business. I participate in Tate & Lyle’s Modern Slavery working group. This is a group of employees across multiple functions led by our head of ethics that manages our supplier audit programme and qualification programme.

I think it really comes down to having a set of criteria and a process to understand our suppliers' business practices. Where they don't have a business practice, or maybe it's not as robust as we would expect, helping and guiding them through the process and giving them time to evolve. 

I think supplier programmes are a lot like agriculture programmes. You meet everyone where they're at and everyone improves together, versus finding a supplier that meets all of your agreements and if you don't, you're out. You can't do business that way, it's not actually improving the supply chain or improving human rights, it's just moving to someone that already has an easy answer. However, obviously compliance is a red line. You need to be compliant when it comes to human rights, forced labour.

What is your approach to building a sustainable supply chain?

When we think about sustainability in our supply chain, we obviously have the ethical sourcing component of it, but there's also the larger environmental impacts. 

We've updated our water risk assessment, for example, last year to really look at water risk within our two main supply chains, corn and stevia. This is to help our procurement team be better informed and work with our suppliers where we're seeing high risk of droughts, for instance.

We also work with suppliers through our regenerative agriculture programmes. We support regenerative agricultural practices in the US, we have a sustainable stevia programme in eastern China with smallholder farmers, and then we combine that regenerative agricultural practice adoption with ensuring that their livelihoods are made sustainable by the process changes that we're implementing. You'll hear us talk about sustainable agriculture because it's marrying together that community aspect with the regenerative agricultural practice adoption that we would really like to see. It helps to reduce the impact on the environment from the farming practices, build healthier soil and all of those practices also add resiliency to the crops, so they're becoming a more climate resilient crop. 

In our stevia programme, last year was the first year that the farmers said ‘we need this programme, we see value in this programme’. They cited their experience with flooding as the reason why they wanted to participate, outside of feeling good and contributing to their community in a really tangible way. They saw the direct impact of those that were participating, and those that weren't participating farmers managed better in the floods than those that weren't. So it's nice to see that cultural shift. It's also nice to see the programme on the ground having a real tangible impact on our supply chain stability, but also their livelihoods and their income.

What renewable agriculture practices are you trying to integrate?

If you look at our corn programme in the states, these are large industrialised farms. Corn's been farmed for tens of thousands of years, so the maturity is there. Farmers often understand their farms and fields but need a bit of technical support in making regenerative practice changes and adopting them across more fields of their farm. A lot of them have started but aren't fully across the process of, for instance, planting cover crops, moving to a no-till situation or managing nitrogen. 

There's also often a cost impact. Sometimes farmers can see a decrease in yield for those first few years. That's where the public-private sector becomes incredibly important in financially incentivising these practice changes. When you combine grant money and funding by Tate & Lyle and our customers, it helps farmers adopt those practice changes without completely taking on the risk themselves of changing practices. They're literally betting their family farm on some of these practices. You have to be mindful of what change looks like and how hard change really can be on a farmer's bottom line. 

If you look at our programme for stevia, a lot of people we support are small shareholder farmers farming in their gardens. It is their family livelihood, it's not an industrialised process. Stevia has only been farmed for about 50 years. For us, a lot of that programme was teaching them how to take soil samples, how to analyse the results of the soil samples and matching that with expertise to understand what that analysis tells us in terms of changes to practices.

It's also understanding the timing of fertiliser use and the amount of fertiliser applied – more isn't necessarily better. We saw a 76% reduction in the use of fertiliser in 2023, which directly impacts greenhouse gas emissions and local water quality. So now you have a sense of pride among the farmers. There's been a huge shift there in the positive direction.

We also have experimental farms where we continue to work with farmers on optimising fertiliser use or seeing how cover crops perform. It’s very much seeing is believing. When you're seeing a change in your neighbor's farm for the better and a new income from, say, a cover crop, that might be something that those farmers opt into next year. 

What is Tate & Lyle doing to support farmers?

Farmers were the original stewards of the environment, they were the original environmentalists. You talk to our corn farmers in the states or European suppliers, they understand their farms incredibly well. They understand soil health. They're adopting regenerative agricultural practices oftentimes on their own, or they know what needs to be done but need assistance or some technical expertise in getting there. 

I think philosophically aligning with your partners is critical to the success of any sustainable agriculture programme. Farmers aren't prescriptive, so we can't look across the US and say ‘everyone must plant cover crops’ or ‘everyone must move to no-till’. That's not the right solution for every farm, for every field, or for every piece of a field even. It's really listening to what the farmers need and matching it with the expertise to try to optimise farming for them. That increases soil health and decreases the impact on the environment because ultimately, a century from now, they still want those farms in their families and they want them to be productive farms. It's important that we help them do that.

What do you think the future will look like for Tate & Lyle?

When I think about Tate & Lyle, our sustainability programmes are driven from an ambition to lead in this space. The programmes that we design are based on data where we think we can have the most impact and what's strategically important to us as a company. 

I think there's an acknowledgement that when companies don't operate in a sustainable way, their future's going to look very different than those that do. There's very much a high level of leadership engagement with our board, with our CEO and with our executive team. It is cornerstone to the way that we operate. 

I think we have customers that certainly lead the way and we have really strong partnerships that have helped us both grow and think about sustainability from different angles. It's important to understand where our suppliers are coming from and their perspective just as much as our customers, who ultimately are going to market. Understanding the role that we play in connecting those two groups helps to really build a more resilient and sustainable supply chain. 

I see us continuing to lead in this space, quite frankly. It's so critical to the way that we operate and I think honestly to our purpose as a company. As you look to feed a growing population, we can't feed them with the practices that we have today. We know we need to change. To be in the food and beverage space and not embrace sustainability isn't part of Tate & Lyle’s future. I frankly don't think it's really part of the industry as you look a decade down the line. It's just that critical.

To read the full story in the magazine click HERE.

Explore the latest edition of Sustainability Magazine and be part of the conversation at our global conference series, Sustainability LIVE. 

Discover all our upcoming events and secure your tickets today.

Sustainability Magazine is a BizClik brand