FINANCIAL STRATEGY

runs on polite disbelief. The vampire on the doorstep is eight years old, everybody knows it, and the KitKats change hands anyway. An annual report asks for the same indulgence over 200 pages, from readers who are paid to notice what was left out. Those readers, the shareholders, pension funds, analysts and lenders who decide what a business is worth, even hand out prizes for the reports that tell it straightest. Last November the Investor Relations( IR) Society, the trade body for the people who broker that conversation, named Britain’ s best: SSE, the FTSE 100 energy group, in the large caps; Norcros, the specialist behind Triton showers, in the smalls; and in the mids Tate & Lyle, the 165-year-old sugar name remade as a food-science business. The mid-cap winner gives the cleanest answer to what the judges were rewarding, because the person who signs Tate & Lyle’ s numbers had, at the time, been in the building for barely a year. Sarah Kuijlaars, Chief Financial Officer of Tate & Lyle, arrived in September 2024 out of De Beers by way of Arcadis and Rolls- Royce, with a quarter-century at Shell behind her, and spent her first months living out of a suitcase instead of a spreadsheet.“ I visited every market, I visited plants and spoke to numerous people to understand what value proposition we can bring to our

Sarah Kuijlaars Chief Financial Officer Tate & Lyle

customers,” she told AccountingWEB last September.“ As a finance function we can’ t challenge the business if we don’ t understand the business. That is the starting point for me.”

The sugar giant that stopped sugar-coating What she inherited was a company that had spent seven years tearing itself down to the studs and rebuilding as if the plan had been obvious from the start. For most of its long life Tate & Lyle sold sweetness in bulk; five years ago corn syrup and its industrial cousins still made up about 85 % of revenue, a figure now down to roughly half, by the company’ s own account.

68 October 2026