Tate & Lyle: How Regenerative Agriculture Helps Corn Farmers

Tate & Lyle is a global leader in ingredient solutions for healthier food and beverages.

It focuses on minimising its environmental impact throughout its supply chain and operations, addressing climate change and water scarcity.

It has partnered with Regrow Ag, an agriculture resilience platform provider, to help support its corn suppliers in France with regenerative agriculture techniques.

Tate & Lyle’s agricultural programme

The programme aims to enable farmers to understand the impact of regenerative agricultural practices while helping them embed them into their operations.

Tate & Lyle’s corn supply comes from farmers in the northeast and southwest of France, which the company is supporting to strengthen climate resilience.

It plans to promote regenerative, restorative and protective practices to growers, including cover cropping, nitrogen management and low and no till techniques.

These help support soil health, reduce the use of synthetic fertilisers and minimise soil disturbance, increasing the sustainability of Tate & Lyle’s operations and supply chain.

Nick Hampton, Chief Executive at Tate & Lyle, says: “Regenerative agriculture is at the heart of our approach to sustainability, because helping farmers to become more resilient to the impacts of increasing climate change related events also enables our customers to feed a growing population – a win-win.

“For businesses in the food chain, flooding, droughts and severe temperatures that affect harvests and the use of natural resources are a shared challenge.”

Regrow Ag’s Resilience Platform

Regrow Ag has created its Agriculture Resilience Platform to allow companies to protect their supply chains and reduce emissions while promoting regenerative agriculture.

The platform enables companies and farmers to measure, model and accelerate regenerative outcomes across their global value chains.

In its partnership with Tate & Lyle, it will help participating farmers to understand the importance of adopting regenerative practices.

The company and its suppliers will use Regrow Ag’s AI software to measure environmental impacts and monitor trends among crops, supporting farmers with data analysis and farm planning.

Anastasia Volkova, CEO and Co-Founder of Regrow Ag, says: “Tate & Lyle’s leadership is helping accelerate the adoption of regenerative practices where it’s needed most: in Europe’s corn-growing regions.

“By pairing local agronomic expertise with credible, AI-powered measurement and monitoring, this programme is demonstrating how collaboration and data transparency can drive meaningful climate action across supply chains.”

Supporting farmers across global supply chains

The partnership with Regrow Ag will allow Tate & Lyle to monitor the environmental impacts of the farms it is supporting across France. 

These farms provide thousands of acres of corn for Tate & Lyle, to be used in many of its specialty ingredients for soups, bakery products, snacks and confectionery.

The programme in France builds upon Tate & Lyle’s existing regenerative agriculture schemes, which support corn growers in the US and stevia growers in China.

“Through our more mature, science and tech-driven regenerative agriculture programmes in the US and China, we’ve demonstrated that these programmes can materially improve yield and crop quality for farmers and the businesses they supply,” Nick says.

“This new programme in France is about supporting farmers and it also makes perfect business sense as it helps to make our supply chain more resilient.”