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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: