One of the country’s top ingredient suppliers is rethinking how it does business following unprecedented demand from food and beverage companies that want to reformulate their products to meet the latest consumer trends.

Ingredion, a company that sells its products in over 120 countries to more than 17,000 customers worldwide, is facing record interest by food companies looking to add protein, cut sugar, adopt clean label formulations or make their products more affordable. 

“It’s going to require companies like us to be more intimate than ever with customers,” said Jim Zallie, Ingredion’s CEO. “We love our customers, and we want to serve all customer categories if we could, but we can’t.” 

Zallie wouldn’t go so far as to say Ingredion, which posted $7.2 billion in net sales last year, is turning away customers, but the 120-year-old company is being more selective about which food manufacturers it agrees to work with and how it deploys its resources.

In determining how to partner with a food maker, Ingredion assesses whether its insight is aligned with current trends, Zallie said. The Illinois-based company also looks at what category the client plays in (private label or clean label are particularly attractive), how fast the business is growing and the impact the partnership would have on Ingredion’s sales and margins.

“We have to be very smart of which customers have the right strategies and portfolios that are aligned to the trends where we can help them best,” Zallie said.

Increasingly, Ingredion said its customers “want to be part of the process” when it comes to finding a solution for a product, according to Patrick Kalotis, Ingredion’s executive vice president of texture and healthful solutions. 

He said that with food manufacturers looking for quicker reformulation options, more of them are turning to Ingredion because of its expertise and expansive database covering thousands of ingredients. Ingredion’s solutions business recently crossed the $1 billion sales mark and is one of its fastest-growing segments, according to Kalotis.

Ingredion is not only supplying ingredients but also helping to provide solutions to a wide range of problems. Recently, for example, Ingredion helped a restaurant chain ensure its French fries remained crisp when they were delivered to a person’s home. It also assisted a food maker in creating a snack bar with extra protein that didn’t have a chalky texture.

To speed up the reformulation process, Ingredion has prioritized what it calls co-briefs, where the company talks with a customer to determine what they are looking to accomplish before providing a “viable prototype” within 15 days — down from three months just a few years ago. In 2025 alone, Ingredion received just under 2,000 such requests from customers and ended up generating about 500 briefs.

The ingredients giant also has a network of 32 global “idea labs,” where food makers and other customers partner with Ingredion to improve products to reach their full potential or solve other market barriers. It also employs food scientists and culinary chefs who understand ingredient innovation. “We’re able to effectively guarantee a higher product success rate because of the intimacy with the customer upfront and the expertise we have,” Kalotis said. When we have “a much higher win rate with our customers, they’re more likely to come back to us again.”

Zallie, who has been at the helm of Ingredion since 2018, said demand for Ingredion’s solution services is unlikely to wane anytime soon.

There is a lot of “pressure on CPG branded goods manufacturers to drive more innovation,” especially with consumers cutting back on spending and younger shoppers showing a penchant for private label offerings, he said. 

The Make America Healthy Again initiative also could become a bigger factor driving ingredient changes, though it’s in “its very early days” and hasn’t been a major catalyst spurring innovation so far.