Tate & Lyle doubles down on BioHarvest alliance

Tate & Lyle has announced a major expansion of its partnership with BioHarvest Sciences, broadening their joint sweetener development programme to target multiple next-generation, plant-based sweetener molecules.

The move signals a shift away from the industry’s historical pursuit of a single silver bullet sugar replacement, focusing instead on providing food and drink manufacturers with a highly customisable formulation toolkit.

Building on an initial 2024 agreement, the expanded collaboration aims to commercialise rare or hard-to-source botanicals without relying on traditional agricultural extraction. For food and beverage manufacturers navigating volatile commodity pricing, tightening health regulations, and shifting consumer preferences, the alliance promises a more stable, scalable, and category-specific pipeline of natural sweetening solutions.

Moving past the silver bullet approach

The core driver behind the expansion is the realisation that a single sweetener cannot satisfy the complex matrix of modern food applications. A sweetener that performs flawlessly in a carbonated soft drink may fail to provide the bulk, mouthfeel, or heat stability required in bakery, dairy, or confectionery products.

Tate & Lyle’s strategy focuses on developing a suite of complementary sweetening options that can be deployed independently or blended. This allows manufacturers to optimise formulations for specific applications while hitting aggressive sugar and calorie reduction targets.

Victoria Spadaro-Grant, chief science and innovation officer at Tate & Lyle, stressed that multiple unmet market needs are unlikely to be solved by one ingredient alone: “The flexibility from the expanded collaboration with BioHarvest is critical as customers seek food and beverage category-specific solutions that balance taste, cost and labelling requirements, while supporting sugar and calorie reduction. This programme strengthens our innovation pipeline in a disciplined and efficient way and reinforces our commitment to advancing the future of sweetness through differentiated, science-led solutions.”

Cultivating sweeteners without agriculture

To bypass the supply chain vulnerabilities, weather dependencies, and land-use issues associated with traditional plant extraction, the partnership leverages BioHarvest’s proprietary Botanical Synthesis platform.

This biotechnology produces non-GMO, plant-based ingredients by growing specific plant cells in bioreactors. For the trade, this offers a dual advantage:

• Scalability and consistency: it ensures a reliable, year-round supply of rare sweetening molecules that are otherwise economically unviable to harvest at a commercial scale via traditional farming.
• Responsible sourcing: the methodology reduces agricultural footprints and resource consumption, aligning with the sustainability mandates currently being passed down from major retailers to food brands.

Zaki Rakib, chief executive officer of BioHarvest Sciences, noted that the broadening of the programme demonstrates distinct confidence in the versatility of their platform to “support a range of sensory, application and economic requirements.”

Aligning with consumer intent

The expansion arrives at a critical juncture for product developers. A proprietary 2025 Tate & Lyle survey across seven global markets revealed that over half of consumers planned to proactively reduce their sugar consumption (Tate & Lyle Proprietary Ingredient Tracker Research – 2025 (Includes 7 Markets – US, Brazil, Germany, UK, UAE, China, and India; 1,000 respondents per market). Crucially, the intent to cut sugar outpaced the intent to reduce both calories and fat, making sugar reduction the primary health driver for modern shoppers.

Tate & Lyle’s innovation strategy intends to use more than a decade of global research into consumer perceptions to ensure that sensory performance, cost-in-use value, and clean-label acceptance are engineered into these new molecules from day one.

By adding BioHarvest’s bio-synthesised molecules to a historical pipeline that includes the discovery of sucralose (1976), the commercialisation of allulose (2015), and the bioconversion of stevia Reb M (2018), Tate & Lyle is positioning itself to dictate the next decade of the global sweetness market — giving manufacturers the precise tools they need to formulate for an increasingly health-conscious consumer base.