Like its sweeteners, Tate & Lyle’s shares are an acquired taste. Over the years, they have delivered pleasant surprises to investors and, on other occasions, left a rather sour taste. More recently, even though its profits have been beating analysts’ expectations, the shares have been neither one thing nor the other, not deliciously sweet, not bitterly sour, but somewhere in between.
Tate & Lyle was founded as a Liverpool-based sugar refiner in 1859. It sold its sugar business, which included Lyle’s Golden Syrup, in 2010 and in its modern incarnation makes and sells the speciality ingredients that help food and drinks companies to cut the amount of sugar, calories and fat in their products and to increase the proportion of fibre. It is a
