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Sustainability and ESG strategy solutions

Meet your ESG goals with Ingredion’s expertise

The race to offer consumers more sustainable options and meet corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals has never been more intense. Responsible sourcing, healthy eating and simple labels are increasingly important to food and beverage consumers. But designing great-tasting products with consumer-preferred, sustainable ingredients requires a trusted sourcing partner with extensive experience.

We believe that sustainability is a shared responsibility and an opportunity to collaborate with our stakeholders to promote a more sustainable planet. This thinking is underscored in our 2030 All Life plan — to bring together the potential of people, nature and technology to make all life better. This strategy allows us to further align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, drive continuous innovation in our own sustainability efforts and help manufacturers meet their corporate sustainability objectives, as well as those of their investors and regulators.

 

The right ingredients for enhanced sustainability

Sustainability initiatives have evolved to include ESG, or the environmental, social and governance aspects of sustainability, to help businesses properly identify and act on specific strategies.

Environmental components

  • Carbon emissions/product carbon data
  • Water
  • Waste and packaging
  • Biodiversity

Social components

  • Human rights
  • Regenerative agriculture
  • Community impact
  • Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)

Governance components

  • Investor ESG
  • Proper reporting
  • Emerging regulations

Taking the steps to show progress in ESG is important to consumers, but manufacturers also face pressure from retailers, shareholders and regulators to accomplish related goals. As the industry moves, it’s paramount for manufacturers to keep up with retailer demands in order to maintain and increase shelf space and reinforce positive business perception for investors to maintain and increase stock prices.

Additionally, being a good corporate citizen of the world from an ESG perspective allows your business to comply with regulatory mandates, and it positions your organisation as a more attractive place of employment for top talent.

 

Partner with Ingredion wherever you are in your sustainability journey

While environmental sustainability is certainly a primary focus, ESG initiatives cover a broad range of issues and activities on the overall spectrum of caring for our planet and its people. We enable our customers to measurably advance their ESG outcomes and attain their goals through our own pursuit of industry-leading sustainability practices.

Two workers in hard hats discussing in front of a facility

How Ingredion can help you accelerate your ESG programme

  • Collaborate to identify and prioritise your sustainability initiatives because what matters to you, matters to us
  • Help execute on your ESG goals, measure progress and report meaningful advancements to your stakeholders
  • Sustainably deliver products with the taste, texture and benefits consumers prefer

Tailored solutions for measurable advancement of your sustainability objectives

Ingredion’s sustainable innovation and regenerative agriculture practices deliver unmatched, industry-leading sustainability results that help propel our customers in meeting their sustainability commitments.

But we know that every business is different, which is why we create a custom approach with each of our partners through a variety of programmes. By customising the most valuable and relevant combination of sustainability options, we can create the best value-add combination of ESG benefits across categories and regions to fit your unique business needs. And, of course, we can help you devise practical plans to help you measure and celebrate your success.

Take the next step in sustainability

Tell us about your priorities across the ESG landscape. Ingredion experts will work with you to find innovative solutions that make a difference.

Contact us

Making an ESG commitment and building momentum

Corporate sustainability initiatives are nothing new, but the method to meeting those objectives has changed to a more holistic or all-encompassing approach. Even still, there have been recent shifts in focus. As of 2022, 62% of businesses are prioritising ESG issues.

 

Business priorities in sustainability

Pre-pandemic

87% of businesses defined sustainability as protecting the environment in 2019.2

2020

59% of businesses prioritised social over environmental issues during the outbreak.

2022

62% of businesses are prioritising ESG issues.

While many businesses have found themselves making progress in ESG, it's been slower than they would prefer. The goals and commitments are highly nuanced, and it has led to a widening gap between businesses making pledges and those making sizable progress toward meeting their stated objectives.

 

The gap between the sustainability pledges businesses are making and actions they are taking is widening

Graph of ESG mentions in company documents, 2005-2021
Source: 2022 Euromonitor International from Alphasense
Source: 2022 Euromonitor International from Alphasense

With consumer expectations and investor and regulatory pressures mounting, now is the time to look for partners and tools that help you advance your sustainability goals. Ingredion is that trusted partner, and our ground-breaking innovations and expertise can help you gain traction in your ESG efforts and mitigate compounding risks that can become extremely costly down the road.

How Ingredion can help manufacturers close the “say-do gap” in sustainability

At Ingredion, we approach our sustainability programme from three angles: Everyday Life, Planet Life, and Connected Life. We continuously work to advance the progress we make through these three lenses, both for our own sustainability goals and to help our customers meet their own.

  • Enriching Everyday Life focuses on human beings and ensuring that our processes don’t come at the expense of safety, human rights, diversity, equity and inclusion
  • Powering Planet Life challenges us to evaluate our sourcing, processing and operations as they relate to environmental impact and the effect they have on biodiversity
  • Changing Connected Life bridges the gap between the products we create and offer our consumers and regenerative agriculture, food security and community impact

 

1. Reformulating for a better world

In our latest global manufacturer survey, 74% of manufacturers said they are reformulating their products to be more aligned with clean label standards and 60% stated they are currently involved in reformulating their products to be more sustainable.1 As pioneers and innovators in the clean label space, and as our strictly plant-based portfolio of sustainable ingredients continues to grow, Ingredion can provide the ingredients and expertise to help your brand stand out with better-tasting, more nutritious and more sustainable products reformulated to meet specific ESG objectives and deliver the delightful eating experiences your consumers expect.

Bar graph of manufacturer reformulation intentions

3 out of 5 food and beverage manufacturers are reformulating for sustainability

Taste and nutrition also figure prominently in reformulation decisions.1

Consumer preferences play a significant role in the drive to reformulate, and those preferences extend to environmental and sustainability considerations. In 2022, 40% of industry experts said they felt moderate or strong pressure from consumers to take action on climate change,2 and those consumers are adjusting their purchasing behaviour to showing support for specific brands and products that align with their values.3

 

2. Greater transparency

While sustainability expectations and measures of success may vary across the board, what stays steady is consumers’ expectation of transparency and sustainability — both social and environmental — from every level of the products they are purchasing, whether that be from ingredient sourcing, manufacturing or packaging. 

Studies show that 68% of consumers globally are looking for sustainably sourced ingredients, and 66% are looking for ingredients that are locally sourced and traceable to their source.1

Ingredion is the first organisation in the food and beverage category to partner with HowGood, the world’s largest data platform of sustainable food, beverage and personal care product offerings that provides sustainability impact validation. This partnership enables greater transparency and empowers our customers to easily — and more accurately — measure the sustainability impacts of Ingredion products utilising specific metrics around greenhouse gas emissions, processing, water usage, soil health, land use and labour risk.

Additionally, we’ve registered all of our global manufacturing facilities with Sedex, allowing the Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audits to third-party validate our leading human rights practices.

Close-up of stevia plants

Sugar reduction environmental impact study

Ingredion developed an industry-leading Sugar Reduction Life Cycle Assessment with ISO verification quantifying the environmental impacts of sweeteners.

Download report

3. Valuable insights

Ingredion’s proprietary ATLAS consumer insights allow us to make more informed decisions in our category development and programme investments. The consumer research helps shape our sustainability commitments and drives innovation that we pass along to our customers to assist in achieving their ESG goals.

Consumers are increasingly aware of ESG-related issues and are choosing products that align with their personal lifestyle and values. Our ATLAS insights help us understand the connections between transparency, nutrition and sustainability by region and category and their effects. Accounting for all the possible considerations, and with exclusive consumer data indicating specific preferences, we can help you create products with the claims that mean the most to your consumers.

Woman enjoying healthy lifestyle

Sustainability and wellness are linked in consumers' minds

Partner with Ingredion and use sustainability to strengthen your position in the wellness space, meet consumer expectations and promote food and beverages with wellness benefits.

Learn more

4. Cutting-edge regenerative agriculture

We are relentless in our development of regenerative agriculture practices. Ingredion is dedicated to having 99% of all of our crops sustainably sourced by 2025, and we are committed to putting at least one-third of our global sourcing under regenerative agriculture practices by 2030.

Additionally, we use the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) Platform’s Farm Sustainability Assessment, which benchmarks performance against 90 global standards to identify the greatest needs of growers around the world. We then work with customers, farmers and non-government organisations in specific regions to create solutions that have a positive environmental and social impact.

 

5. Decreasing waste

Ingredion is taking future-forward steps to create efficiencies and reduce waste through innovative product and process design and supply chain integration.

For example, we create opportunities to upcycle imperfect inputs — think fruits and vegetables that aren’t going to win any beauty contests — and create viable products such as potato starches or fruit concentrates that would otherwise be thrown away.

Ingredion’s plant proteins recognised for sustainability excellence

Our ultra-performance line of plant-based protein solutions has been named the Best Plant-Based Sustainability winner during the 2022 World Plant-Based Awards. This better tasting, more sustainable product line provides great versatility in a variety of applications.

Learn more

Our work in ESG

We collaborate with our customers to help them Own the AND℠. From a sustainability standpoint, that means we can work collectively to create products that advance your progress in ESG — satisfying investor and regulator interests — AND deliver the taste, texture, nutritional aspects your consumers demand.

Our leading-edge science is grounded in producing innovative solutions that empower manufacturers to create the future of food and beverages. We continue to expand and enhance our sustainability efforts and find new ways to strengthen the link between sustainability and growth with our customers. Here are some of our more recent accomplishments in ESG:

Reducing our carbon footprint

Partner: Unilever

In 2022, Ingredion engaged with Unilever to pilot the Ecochain software to determine the carbon footprint of a product we are supplying to them. The purpose of this pilot was to evaluate the software solution for product carbon footprinting, as well as the time resource demand in conducting this work. We continue to evaluate solutions like Ecochain and HowGood to meet growing customer demand for more clarity on the environmental footprint of the ingredients we supply.

Better measurement on emissions data

Partner: Microsoft

We helped Microsoft in the testing and development of their Cloud for Sustainability software. They continue to work toward better data collection and analytics of carbon emissions, and we are particularly excited about the work being done to help capture and evaluate Scope 3 emissions across our supply chain.

Our commitment to sustainable water use

Partners: Ceres/World Wildlife Fund, PepsiCo.

In 2021, Ingredion joined the Ceres and World Wildlife Fund’s AgWater Challenge to help promote more sustainable water use across agricultural supply chains. Our commitment includes ensuring a million acres of crops in our supply chain are under regenerative practices. In 2022, we progressed to having over 50,000 acres in regenerative agriculture projects, mostly through our collaboration with PepsiCo. As we continue to scale up our efforts, we aspire to have more than 100,000 acres under regenerative programmes by the end of 2023.

Focusing on children’s rights

Partner: Global Child Forum

In December 2022, members of Ingredion’s sustainability team were pleased to have joined the Global Child Forum’s annual meeting, hosted by their Majesties the King and Queen of Sweden at the Royal Palace in Stockholm. With members of the royal family, we participated in action labs to explore how industry can better support children’s rights in areas such as supply chains, marketing, health and nutrition. Ingredion is looking forward to continued collaboration with the Global Child Forum in the future, starting by joining their Business Academy in 2023.

Supporting food banks around the world

Partners: Global FoodBanking Network, Food Bank Leadership Institute

We continue our relationship with The Global FoodBanking Network (GFN) by being a corporate sponsor of the Food Bank Leadership Institute (FBLI), a global meeting that helps support food banks around the world with education and best practice sharing. Additionally, we are working with GFN to re-launch a programme where Ingredion personnel provide technical support for food banks located near our facilities.

Ingredion's commitment to sustainable agriculture in China

Ingredion teamed up with Unilever China to cut carbon emissions by reducing the usage of Green House Gas (GHG) fertilisers and implementing sustainable application techniques. This project not only achieved a remarkable 27.59% reduction in GHG fertilisers and a significant 12% decrease in input but also delivered an outstanding 16% increase in crop yield.

Let’s make your ESG goals a reality

With our deep formulation expertise, broad portfolio of in-demand, plant-based ingredients and comprehensive market and consumer insights, Ingredion can help your company advance its ESG and sustainability programmes AND deliver the products that drive brand growth.

Contact us today

1. Ingredion Proprietary Food & Beverage Manufacturers Study, 2023

2. Euromonitor Voice of the Industry: Sustainability Survey, 2022

3. Euromonitor International Voice of the Consumer: Lifestyles Survey, 2022