To find out about the major events in Tate & Lyle's history, click on the images on the timeline above. To jump forward or backward in time, click on the years in the boxes above the timeline.
Sugar was first discovered in India in the 5th century BC, and first used as a food in Polynesia. Alexander the Great introduced sugar as a sweetener into Mediterranean countries during the 4th century BC, and use spread to North Africa and Southern Spain.
Sugar arrived in England around 1100, brought back by returning Crusaders. Yet it remained a rare delicacy for several hundred years, and in the 1500s a one-hundred-ton shipload of sugar was worth about a million pounds at today's prices.
Venice became the hub of the world sugar trade in the 16th century, but Antwerp was the centre for sugar refining. It was Columbus who took sugar cane cuttings from the Canary Islands to the West Indies, where they thrived in the hot climate.
Imported cane sugar dominated world sugar trade until the 19th century, when continental Europe began to produce beet sugar, while other temperate zones challenged cane's supremacy. In this time of change, Henry Tate and Abram Lyle took the opportunity to found their own sugar businesses based in the UK.
Tate & Lyle ingredients can be found everywhere in your house today, from fridge and freezer through wardrobes and papers, into its very foundations. For more information about our products please click here.
A minister's son, Henry Tate was born in 1819 in Chorley, Lancashire in the UK. At the age of 20 Henry began his career as a grocer's apprentice to his elder brother Caleb. He went on to buy his own grocery store, and by the age of 36 was a successful businessman, with a chain of six shops in the Liverpool area.
His first venture into cane refining came in 1859 when he formed a partnership with John Wright, who was already a refiner operating in Liverpool. When that partnership came to an end, Tate was joined by his two sons, Alfred and Edwin, in Henry Tate & Sons.
Henry had an eye for innovations and technological advances, and during the construction of the Love Lane Refinery in Liverpool, he adapted the plans so he could incorporate a new refining technique to increase the yield of white sugar. When the refinery became operational in 1872, it was producing 400 tons of sugar a week.
Tate was keen to extend his business, and saw London as a potentially profitable market. In 1878 he opened his refinery at Silvertown in East London.
Henry Tate was created a baronet in 1898 and died in 1899, having endowed his collection of contemporary paintings to the nation. He made bequeaths to many causes, including support for the building of the famous Tate Gallery, now known as Tate Britain.
It was Henry Tate that introduced the sugar cube to the UK, after buying rights from German inventor Eugen Langen in 1875, in partnership with David Martineau.
Tate & Lyle has trading links to the Caribbean dating back to Henry Tate purchasing sugar from 1859 onwards. At this time, the region was dependent on its cane sugar industry and under pressure from European beet sugar production. Tate & Lyle first took an interest in Caribbean plantations in 1936 (following the British Government’s forced purchase of its domestic sugar beet business) but today purchases sugar from cane growers rather than planting direct.
Tate & Lyle continues to enjoy a successful long-standing trading relationship with the Caribbean. The Company acts as the most important bridge to Europe for African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) and Least Developed (LDC) countries. Tate & Lyle takes some 1.29m tonnes of their annual production, the vast majority of these countries' long-held entitlement to sell about 1.5m tonnes of sugar every year into the EU. As a result of this access to the EU, which we facilitate, our ACP and LDC suppliers currently receive £150m - £200m more for their sugar than would otherwise be the case because we are required to buy this sugar from them at the EU-established price.
Throughout the various phases of our history, Tate & Lyle’s role in the Caribbean economy has always been a beneficial one, based on providing, though our technical efficiency and innovation, the ability for Caribbean sugar producers to maintain their market presence in Europe in the face of the increasingly efficient and protected domestic beet industry.
Born in 1820 in Greenock, Scotland, Abram Lyle started his working life at the age of 12 as an apprentice in a lawyer's office, before joining his father's cooperage businesses. He subsequently developed his career in shipping in partnership with his friend, John Kerr. The Lyle fleet grew to become one of the largest in Greenock.
As a cooper and shipowner, Abram was involved in transporting sugar for many years. In 1865, he added sugar refining to his business interests through his purchase, with four partners, of the Glebe Sugar Refinery. After the death of the principal partner, John Kerr, in 1872, Lyle sold his shares and looked for a site for a new refinery.
In 1883 Abram Lyle & Sons started melting sugar in the Plaistow Refinery, just a mile-and-a-half from Henry Tate's refinery.
Lyle knew that the sugar cane refining process produced a treacly syrup that usually went to waste - but could be refined to make a delicious preserve and sweetener for cooking. "Goldie" was made from the very start, in small but increasing quantities. The syrup was poured into wooden casks and sold to employees and local customers. Word spread even faster than the syrup - and in a few short months, a tonne a week was being sold.
Wooden casks soon gave way to large Lyle's Golden Syrup dispensers that were placed on shelves of grocery stores. Lyle's Golden Syrup was first filled into tins in 1885. Today more than a million tins leave the Plaistow factory on the banks of the River Thames each month.
Abram Lyle died in 1891, leaving his sons to carry on the business at Plaistow Wharf.
Abram Lyle had strong religious beliefs, which is why the Lyle's Golden Syrup trademark depicts a quotation from the Bible. In the Old Testament (Book of Judges 14:14) Samson was travelling to the land of the Philistines in search of a wife. During the journey he killed a lion, and on his return past the same spot he noticed that a swarm of bees had formed a comb of honey in the carcass. Samson later turned this into a riddle: "Out of the eater came forth meat and out of the strong came forth sweetness".
The "lion and bees" were quickly becoming identified with Lyle's Golden Syrup, and it was registered as Lyle's trademark in 1904. Plaistow employees did not forget to celebrate its 100th birthday in 2004.
However, no-one knows why Abram chose the wording 'Out of the strong came forth sweetness'. Was he referring to the tin holding the syrup - or the company producing it?
The famous Lyle's Golden Syrup tin is now one of the most familiar sights in British kitchens - and instantly recognisable among the 20,000 items stocked by today's supermarkets. This distinctive packaging has hardly changed since 1885 and has been named by Guinness World Records as the world's oldest branding in 2007!
In 1873, just one year after Tate and sons opened their Liverpool refinery, the Callebaut Brothers and Joseph Lejeune established the SA Callebaut Fréres et Lejeune glucose plant in Aalst, Belgium, which would later become the Amylum Group.
The group began their business to serve the local brewing industry. While Joseph Lejeune and Edouard Callebaut concentrated on technical matters, overseeing production and the purchase of raw materials, oldest brother Philemon took responsibility for financial transactions, assisted by Felix Callebaut. In 1878 another younger brother, Prosper, became a co-director, and after the death of Philemon he went on to found Callebaut Frères. Prosper was the first employer in Belgium to grant a pension to retired staff - one Belgian franc a day.
In 1926 the Callebaut brothers merged their business with the Ancienne Firme Blieck Frères into a new company, called Glucoseries Réunies. Today, the business they founded is one of Europe's largest starch producers.
Tate & Lyle produces enough industrial starch each year to create 35 billion magazines.
Today Tate & Lyle is the only cane sugar refiner in the UK and its brand name is one of the best known. A century ago it was a very different picture. In 1864 there were 74 refineries in the country with many families, such as the MacFies, Martineaus, Fairries, Walkers and Kerrs, involved in the sugar-refining process. It was against this background of competition that Henry Tate and Abram Lyle began their respective sugar businesses.
While Tate"s new Thames refinery began operations in 1878, specialising in cube sugar, Lyle's refinery at Plaistow, also on the Thames, opened in 1883 and soon specialised in Golden Syrup production.
By 1939, the operations of Tate and Lyle had merged, and the Thames refinery had become the largest cane sugar refinery in the world, producing 14,000 tons a week, while Plaistow produced 8,500 tons and Liverpool 10,000 tons.
To cope with the increase in output, a new pan house was built at Plaistow. It was an impressive building, standing 180ft (about 55m) high, which would all too soon become a target for the Luftwaffe…
As the largest cane sugar refiner in Europe today, Tate & Lyle provides jobs for more than 300,000 people in African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. Through access to the EU sugar market, less developed countries can get a much higher price for their sugar than they would get on the world market.
Once a common sight, sailing barges with their distinctive red ochre sails and tall, stately masts were designed to move bulk cargoes from shallow and confined waters around the east and south-east coast of the UK and continental North Sea ports.
The sailing barge May was built in 1891 at Harwich. After some years in service as a grain transport vessel, the sb May was bought in 1964 by a subsidiary company of Tate & Lyle - Silvertown Services Lighterage Ltd. The barge continued to be used in trade and to provide sail training experience to company apprentices.
Today the sb May is one of the finest sailing barges left in existence. She has been carefully preserved, and is now used primarily for chartering for business meetings and entertainment.
The sb May can probably claim to be more travelled than most sailing barges, having been shipped to Montreal for the 1976 Olympic Games. She travelled some 1,500 miles in North America and Canada, receiving 35,000 visitors.
At the beginning of the 20th century, American entrepreneur Augustus Eugene (Gene) Staley was buying bulk starch for two cents a pound, repackaging it under his own Cream Starch label, and selling it for a profit of five cents a pound. When his suppliers realised that Staley was serious competition, they joined together to cut off his supply of raw materials. Staley responded by setting up the A E Staley Manufacturing Company in 1906. He bought a starch plant in Illinois, and began processing on 12 March 1919, grinding 1000 pounds of corn.
Born in 1867, Gene Staley died in 1940, having seen his son, A E Staley Jnr (Gus) become president eight years earlier. Today the company he founded is one of the largest corn refiners in the USA. During its history the company has been party to many notable achievements, including the building of the Staley dam (now the Lake Decatur dam) in 1919, the introduction of soybean processing, development of a nutrient for penicillin, continuing expansion of the company's research and development programmes and facilities, and growth in a range of products manufactured across the USA and Mexico.
The Chicago Bears American football team, winners of the Superbowl in 1986, began life as the Decatur Staleys in 1920, the same year as the birth of the professional football league in the USA. The team was declared national champions in 1922, and even as the Chicago Bears continues to use Staley da Bear as its mascot.
Once the competing sugar refinery firms of Henry Tate and Abram Lyle had set up operations next to each other in East London, competition was intense. Yet there does seem to have been a tacit understanding that Lyle would not produce sugar cubes and Tate would not venture into golden syrup production.
Both businesses experienced difficult times, as sugar-cane importers faced new competition from European sugar-beet. By the First World War three times as much sugar-beet was being imported into Britain as sugar-cane. However, the war destroyed many beet growing areas, and demand for sugar-cane rose once more. By this time, Henry Tate and Abram Lyle were refining 50% of the country's sugar between them.
In 1921 the two companies of Tate and Lyle merged to form Tate & Lyle. The intense competition mellowed into friendly rivalry between the two refineries known to employees as "Tateses" and "Lyleses". At the same time, expansion for the new company continued apace in both beet and sugar-cane, and through acquisition of smaller UK refiners.
Modernisation arrived in the form of the first Tate & Lyle packaging machine, made by Hesser of Stuttgart. Replacing sacks with pre-weighted and printed cartons, this early robot revolutionised the way that sugar was sold.
Tate & Lyle was one of the original companies in the FT-30 index founded in 1935. There are only three constituents from the original FT-30 index still listed today – GKN, ICI and Tate & Lyle.
In the post-World War II era, the socialist government of Clement Attlee pursued a policy of nationalisation for key UK industries. By 1949 it had become apparent that the British sugar industry - and more specifically Tate & Lyle - was to be included in the plan.
On the 10th of February a meeting of the board at Tate & Lyle signalled the beginning of a fierce campaign to thwart the government's plans. Spearheading the campaign was a cartoon character, Mr Cube, drawn by artist Bobby St John Cooper.
Mr Cube fast became a household name. Appearing on sugar packets and in the press, and even travelling the country with the "Speakers Team", which had been formed by Tate & Lyle employees, Mr Cube helped present the Company's eventually successful case for independence.
Tate & Lyle achieved total sales in the year to 31 March 2006 of £3.7 billion, thanks to the efforts of the 7,000 employees in its subsidiaries, and 4,800 in joint ventures.
In 1959 Tate & Lyle acquired 51% of Redpath Sugars in Canada, a move that was to be followed by more acquisitions over the following decades taking the Group into other renewable resources such as corn (maize), wheat and molasses.
Today, the highly efficient cane sugar refinery in Toronto produces refined sugar for both industrial and retail markets and Tate & Lyle is a world-leading ingredients company with operations predominantly focused in Europe and the US.
Tate & Lyle operates more than 65 production facilities in 29 countries mainly throughout Europe, the Americas and South East Asia.
Tate & Lyle Molasses began life in Liverpool in 1910, with the name Marquis, as a firm of cattle feed importers. Under the ownership of the Dane Sir Michael Kroyer Kielberg, the company began shipping molasses in bulk, using a custom-built 3,000-ton storage tank in Hull.
In 1925 Kielberg moved to London and renamed his incorporated company to become United Molasses. As he found new competitively priced sources of molasses, Kielberg required a new longer-range and faster fleet of vessels. To meet the demand, the Athel Line was launched with 16 vessels. The fleet was to see many losses to enemy action during the Second World War.
In 1937 Kielberg sold his Liverpool sugar refinery to Tate & Lyle, and in return was invited to become a co-investor in Tate & Lyle's new West Indies raw sugar ventures. This was the beginning of a prosperous relationship between the two companies.
Kielberg retired in 1953, and ten years later United Molasses was bought by Tate & Lyle for £30 million. With this acquisition, Tate & Lyle became the world leader in the molasses trade.
Molasses is used in the building industry as an additive to concrete.
In the first of a series of events that shaped the modern day Tate & Lyle, the company acquired a one-third stake in Amylum in 1976, which established for the first time a major interest in cereal sweetener and starch-based manufacturing. This interest was to be increased 12 years later.
Tate & Lyle's starches and cereal sweeteners can be used to give energy to sports drinks, replace fats in yoghurts, add sheen to fruit pies, help heat dissipate in microwave meals and improve shelf-life. Our industrial starches add strength and texture to realms of paper and board across the world.
By adding starches to sauces, soups and gravies we can help cut calories by up to 50%.
In 1983, Tate & Lyle invested in the Portuguese sugar refining company Alcântara. Today, the company is part of Tate & Lyle Sugars, Europe.
The beginnings of Alcântara were founded in 1890 when John Peter Hornung explored the sugar-cane properties in Mozambique, establishing the 'Companhia do Assucar de Mocambique'. Mozambique at that time was a Portuguese colony so Hornung decided Lisbon was the right place to start a refinery. Refinaria Colonial, located in Alcântara, was inaugurated in 1909 by King Manuel II and his uncle, D. Afonso. The annual capacity was about 20,000 tons of sugar.
By 1950 Refinaria Colonial had become Sidul (Sociadade Industrial do Ultramar) and in 1980 a new company, Alcântara - Sociedade de Empreendimentos Açucareiros, SA was formed (following the independence of Mozambique in 1975) owning the Lisbon refinery. In 1990, Sidul and Sores (Sociedade de Refinadores de Santa Iria, SA), solely owned by Alcântara since 1989, were merged to form Alcântara Refinarias Açucares, SA.
The Sidul refinery closed in 1994 and all production was moved to Santa Iria, where daily capacity was increased to 800 tons. The sugar refined in Santa Iria Azóia is used in the manufacturing of soft drinks, confectionery, ice-cream, jams, cakes as well as general pharamaceutical uses. In the retail sector, the company markets sugar products under its famous brands: Sidul and Sores.
In a 12-month period Tate & Lyle Sugars Europe completes over 74,000 customer orders.
In 1988 Tate & Lyle acquired 90% of the North American AE Staley Manufacturing Co., and increased its stake in Amylum to 63%. Twelve years later, Tate & Lyle acquired the outstanding minority interests of both companies to form its global food and industrial ingredients business.
The starches and cereal sweeteners produced by this business are made by milling corn (maize) or wheat to produce a starch substrate that can be "finished" into a range of different ingredients with different functional properties. Tate & Lyle products are used and consumed all over the world and serve major branded food and beverage manufacturers as well as the pharmaceutical, cosmetic, building, paper and board, textile and animal feed industries.
Tate & Lyle produces enough food starch to replace the fat in five billion bottles of salad dressing.
In 1998 Tate & Lyle acquired the citric acid business of Haarmann & Reimer, a subsidiary of Bayer AG, to become the world's leading producer of citric acid. Citric acid is made by fermenting carbohydrate feedstocks, which are then separated and purified. As a natural preservative and flavour enhancer, it's one of the most commonly added food acidulants in the food and beverage industry today. It is also used in applications such as dishwasher and washing detergents, metal cleaners etc., as a solubility aid and pH adjuster. In the pharmaceutical industry it is used in cough mixtures, pain relievers and toothpaste because of its flavouring and stabilising properties.
Our citric acid is used to make over 350,000 tonnes of laundry detergent worldwide each year. That's around 4.5 billion socks lost in the wash!
In 2003, Tate & Lyle and Igene Biotechnology, Inc announced a 50-50 joint venture to produce Aquasta™, a natural form of the nutrient astaxanthin. In 2004 production began at a newly constructed facility in Selby in the UKAstaxanthin is part of the normal diet of wild salmon and trout, and is added to the feed of farm-raised fish. Astaxanthin gives both wild and farmed fish their characteristic reddish tint, and is an essential dietary nutrient. In the wild, fish obtain astaxanthin by eating krill, shrimp, and other planktonic crustaceans. Unlike synthetic astaxanthin, Aquasta™ is produced naturally through a fermentation process and is very similar to the astaxanthin found in Antarctic krill. Compared to synthetic astaxanthin, Aquasta™ provides improved colour stability and is better absorbed by fish. In addition, Aquasta™ is GMO free.
In its first year of production, Aquasta™ will provide nutrition for 250,000 tonnes of farmed salmon - about 15% of the total salmon production worldwide.
The name "Aquasta™" is derived by combining "aqua" (meaning water) with "asta" (short for astaxanthin). The name reflects Aquasta™'s primary purpose - providing an essential nutrient to the fish farming industry.
In 2004 Tate & Lyle and DuPont announced a new U.S. joint venture to produce Bio-PDO textile polymer ingredient from renewable resources for use in DuPont™ Sorona® . Sorona® polymers are stain, UV and chlorineresistant with excellent "stretch and recovery", and are exceptionally gentle to the touch making them ideal for a range of purposes, such as swimwear, clothing, car seating and carpets.
Importantly, Bio-PDO is produced from renewable resources and replaces petrochemicals, using less energy and producing fewer emissions than synthetic production methods.
Using polymer ingredient Bio-PDO to make DuPont™ Sorona® in place of the original chemical method saves 600,000 barrels (a staggering 92 million litres) of oil a year.
DuPont™ Sorona® are trademarks or registered trademarks of E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company
SPLENDA® Sucralose, the no-calorie sweetener made from sugar and tastes like sugar, was discovered by Tate & Lyle in conjunction with researchers at Queen Elizabeth College, University London, in 1976. Tate & Lyle subsequently developed sucralose in partnership with McNeil Nutritionals (a Johnson & Johnson company).
In April 2004 Tate & Lyle realigned its agreements with McNeil Nutritionals and became the sole manufacturer of SPLENDA® Sucralose and is also responsible for global sales of SPLENDA® Sucralose ingredient to food and beverage manufacturers. McNeil Nutritionals own the SPLENDA® trademark and is responsible for global sales and marketing of SPLENDA® No Calorie Sweetener tabletop and food service products to consumers.
Today, SPLENDA® Sucralose is used to sweeten over 4,000 products world-wide.
SPLENDA® and the SPLENDA® logo are trademarks of McNeil Nutritionals, LLC.