Ingredion Launches Incubator, Makes Leadership Changes

January 8, 2018

Global ingredient solutions business, Ingredion, announced it has launched Ingredion for Emerging Business, a U.S.-based incubator platform designed to drive growth for emerging food and beverage startups.

Headquartered in Illinois, Ingredion uses grains, fruits, vegetables, and other plant feedstocks to make value-added ingredients, sweeteners, starches, nutritional ingredients, and biomaterials for the food, beverage, paper, and pharmaceutical industries. Using its technology, Ingredion can process foods such as corn, potatoes, or strawberries into ingredients that make candy sweeter, crackers crisper, yogurt creamier, lotions silkier, or tissues softer and stronger.

This new initiative established by the company will advise entrepreneurs on scaling up production, product development, and ingredients for product formulation. The incubator will include an e-commerce platform offering a wide range of applications and a portfolio of select clean-label, non-GMO, and conventional ingredients solutions from Ingredion including starches, fibers, pulse proteins, and sweeteners, which can be used by startups to formulate products that tap into consumer trends.

“We understand that entrepreneurs wear many hats and want to draw on partner resources and capabilities to find the right ingredients, solve product and formulation challenges and get to market faster,” said Evan Hyman, director of Emerging Business at Ingredion.

Aside from help with product formulation, entrepreneurs also will have access to Ingredion’s proprietary consumer research and market insights, as well as technical advice to help startups accelerate commercialization.

“Ingredion has the expertise to address many challenges start-ups face and can provide customer and market insights to help emerging businesses develop and bring trend-setting products to market,” said Hyman.

Change in Leadership

In the last weeks of 2017 Ingredion also announced a series of shifts to its leadership team, effective January 1, 2018.

Jim Zallie, formerly executive vice president, global specialties and president, Americas, will assume the role of president and CEO upon the turn of the new year.

“Ingredion’s success is driven by our people. We have an excellent leadership team and I look forward to working with them as we implement Ingredion’s long-term strategy and continue to create shareholder value,” says Zallie.

Pierre Perez Y Landazuri will be promoted to senior vice president and president, EMEA as of January 1, and he and Ernesto Pousada, senior vice president and president South America, will become officers of the company and will join the executive leadership team at the same time.

Beginning in February, Jorgen Kokke will be promoted to executive vice president, global specialties and president North America, and will head of the company’s $3.5 billion North American business.  

A Subtle Difference

The move to launch venture capital arms and accelerator programs or incubators has become a widely used method by some of the world’s largest and most conventional companies to achieve diversification, and gain a foothold and establishing relevance in a swiftly changing consumer market. CPG companies also use these programs as a means to stay a step ahead of their competition and independent venture capital firms that are realizing the growth potential in disruptive food innovation.

The strategy of incorporating venture capital and innovation accelerator programs as a tool into an iconic company’s growth objective has become so widespread that the list of names continues to grow to include General Mills, Tyson Foods, Kellogg, Campbell Soup, Danone, and Hain Celestial.

However, some companies, such as Ingredion, are launching units or initiatives that not only focus on fostering innovation and growth for startups, but are doing so in a way that directly incorporates their own products into that process.

In November 2017 Italian pasta brand Barilla announced it was launching Blu1877, a  hybrid venture capital fund and innovation hub designed to foster the growth of food-based startups focused on categories that are related to, or tangential to Barilla’s business and products.

The company has allocated an undisclosed amount that it initially intends to commit as seed-stage investments in innovative startups engaged in related areas to its core business and meal solutions, Victoria Spadaro Grant, CEO, president, and CTO of Barilla, told The Spoon. These categories include pasta, sauces, bakery and fruit-based products, the Mediterranean diet, and condiments that are complementary to Italian cuisine that can generate value along the entire supply chain.

-Lynda Kiernan 

Lynda Kiernan is Editor with GAI Media and daily contributor to GAI News. If you would like to submit a contribution for consideration, please contact Ms. Kiernan at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com.

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