Targeting Even Better Execution

COMMERCIAL EXCELLENCE

In 2023, Ingredion took commercial excellence to new levels, including expanding our Pricing Centers of Excellence in response to sharply rising inflation. This allowed us to maintain our ability to price and pass through higher raw material costs. Throughout the year, our teams around the world leveraged regional pricing centers to continuously assess the value that individual ingredients bring to a recipe and price accordingly.

At the same time, Ingredion's sales teams secured multiyear contracts at current market pricing with some of our larger global customers. These contracts, which cover sizable volumes, should support margin expansion in 2024.

In addition, we increased the visibility of global order tracking for customers and improved warehousing logistics, which reduced customer pickup times while lowering freight costs. These initiatives have generated higher Net Promoter Scores and positive customer feedback.

Collaborations with Customers

To reduce formulation and production costs, our customers turn to Ingredion to leverage the functionality of our solutions and the insights of our experts. We engage with customers to co-create new products through our Ingredion Idea Labs® innovation centers and virtual creative culinary studios.

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INGREDION HAS
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Idea Labs® innovation centers that leverage the talents of more than 500 food technologists and scientists.

To facilitate these efforts, we rely on ATLAS, the largest proprietary consumer research program in the food and beverage industry. ATLAS contains more than 10 years of data from over 100,000 consumer interviews in 33 global markets, providing context to pinpoint emerging trends in ingredients and changes in consumer expectations. In addition, our proprietary ATLAS product simulator uses digital prototyping to accelerate innovation, helping our customers reduce R&D expenses and increase the efficiency of new product development.

Purpose-driven and People-centric Growth Culture

  • Recognized as one of the World's Most Ethical Companies by Ethisphere for the ninth time
  • Included in the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index for the sixth consecutive year
  • Named among the “U.S. News & World Report” 2023-2024 Best Companies To Work For
  • Recognized as one of the 2023 Top Regional Companies in the U.S. by DiversityInc
  • Earned the Equality 100 Award: Leader in LGBTQ+ Workplace Inclusion from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation
  • Received an Ethics and Values in the Industry Award from the Mexican Confederation of Industrial Chambers for the ninth consecutive year
  • Achieved Great Place To Work certification in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia for the second consecutive year
  • Recognized as a Top Employer in Malaysia, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, China, Germany, and the United Kingdom
  • Achieved an employee engagement score of 79 points across the organization, a four-point increase over the Microsoft Viva Glint global engagement benchmark of 75

Cost Competitiveness through Operational Excellence

A major challenge in 2023 was adjusting production to changing customer demand. During the first half of the year, customers reduced excess inventory that they accumulated post-pandemic to buffer supply chain disruptions, but as the year progressed, destocking slowed. Our supply chain experts worked closely with the commercial organization and operations to ensure we met the ebbs and flows in customer demand while maintaining sufficient, yet not excessive, finished goods inventory.

Throughout the year, we pursued operational excellence on several fronts. Our operations team continued to manage production inputs to help compensate for inflation and absorb fixed costs, offsetting more than $50 million of increased allocated costs by achieving higher productivity.

Ingredion also launched a connected factory strategy to further increase productivity. As part of this initiative, our team in Hamburg, Germany, is using artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize batch cycle times, delivering up to a 5% increase in asset utilization. Lessons learned will guide us as we roll out AI to our other facilities.

Sequential Quarterly Volume Improvement

(indexed against 2019 quarterly average of shipped volume*)

Sequential Quarterly Volume Improvement

* Shipped head product volume excludes global HFCS shipped volume, as well as impact of Argentina JV (2021) and Cedar ethanol (2020)