Tate & Lyle Investing $30 Million to Debottleneck Alabama Plant

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). After acquiring the McNeil Nutritionals sucralose plant last February in McIntosh, Alabama, from McNeil-PPC Incorporated (New Brunswick, New Jersey), a division Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) (New Brunswick, New Jersey), Tate & Lyle PCL (LSE: TATE) (London, England), has decided to invest about $30 million in process debottlenecks and upgrades to significantly expand the plant's production capacity.

Several debottlenecking projects are currently underway that will return the plant to its original nameplate production capacity when the facility was built in 2000 for production of SPLENDA® sucralose, a sugar-based, low-calorie sweetener.

The company selected Lockwood Greene Engineers (Atlanta, Georgia) to provide design drawings for the expansion. Tate & Lyle will utilize construction contractors currently in the plant and on-site to perform the work.

Most of the construction activity will involve retrofitting, upgrading, and expanding the existing patented manufacturing processes in order to increase capacity and overall sucralose product quality. Installation is expected to take about a year to complete.

The expansion comes on the heels of the Cola Wars Part II, with the introduction of new mid-calorie carbonated beverages, such as Coca-Cola's C2 and Pepsi's Edge products, which will require sucralose sweeteners to give the products that sugar punch with half the calories. With the McNeil acquisition, Tate & Lyle became the sole manufacturer responsible for the world-wide ingredient sales of SPLENDA® sucralose to food and beverage manufacturers.

Tate & Lyle is a world leader in ingredients. Its core competence is in taking corn, wheat, or sugar, and adding value to these raw materials through technology. As a result of continuous innovation, it offers an ever-wider product portfolio of versatile and functional ingredients. These products include cereal sweeteners, starches, sugars, and citric acid. Tate & Lyle products have wide applications in the food, beverage, pharmaceutical, cosmetic, paper, packaging, and building industries.

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