Quality, reliability and punctuality are all vital when you are preparing flavours tailored to customers all over the world. Operating in 46 developed and emerging markets, our dynamic team manages a complex supply network, from growers to shippers, to ensure our customers can rely on excellent and consistent products arriving just when they need them.

As consumers, we have high expectations of the food and beverages we consume – and great taste always comes first. Increasingly, due to health and wellness concerns, consumers are making additional demands from their favourite food and beverage brands – asking for less salt, reduced sugar and more natural ingredients, but without compromising taste or texture.

These demands create difficult challenges for food and beverage manufacturers. Making foods healthier is not as easy as simply reducing levels of salt or sugar, or substituting a key ingredient. Such alterations require a thorough understanding of the complexities of taste, how ingredients work together, and how to add or remove ingredients to still achieve the ideal taste profile.

It is a matter of understanding taste 'performance' – and this is an area in which Givaudan excels. We call it our TasteSolutions™ programme: a palette of ingredients and technologies. These are designed to enable food manufacturers and processors to either reduce salt, enhance sweetness or build back deliciousness into their products, while maintaining consumer taste preferences.

Givaudan’s TasteSolutions™ Salt helps manufacturers reduce salt to more healthy levels without altering the taste that consumers love, including formulations that are not dependent on potassium chloride. TasteSolutions™ Sweetness helps our customers make their beverages taste sweeter while reducing sugar and calories. Givaudan is developing beverage applications using the natural, zero-calorie sweetener derived from the stevia plant and has developed bitterness-blocking technology to mask unwanted off-tastes.

TasteSolutions™ demonstrates Givaudan's strength in taste research and in understanding what it takes to make foods taste great, whatever the parameters. Givaudan's deep knowledge of taste has led to double-digit growth in the number and value of the company's taste projects over the past 18 months and to numerous marketplace successes for our customers.