Our strategy
Focus on Health, Nutrition & Bioscience
In September 2021, we announced our decision to accelerate our journey toward becoming a company focused on Health, Nutrition & Bioscience, using our resources and capabilities to address the urgent societal and environmental challenges linked to the way the world produces and consumes food.
In the face of multiple systemic and interconnected food system challenges that impact the health and well-being of people, animals, and the planet, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report of 2021 warns our world is rapidly approaching critical and irreversible tipping points. Climate change is already creating considerable challenges for food systems worldwide, while at the same time food production remains one of the largest contributors to environmental degradation. Advances in digital technology and bioscience offer realistic scalable solutions to tackle these challenges, creating new markets and innovation opportunities. With our strong combination of scientific competences and growing portfolio of nutrition and health solutions, we are ideally positioned to capture these opportunities and create value for people and planet as well as our business.
We underpinned our transformation by creating three market-focused Business Groups in which we organize our Health, Nutrition & Bioscience activities with effect from 1 January 2022:
- Animal Nutrition & Health
- Health, Nutrition & Care
- Food & Beverage
Each Business Group will have clear opportunities to benefit the health of people and the health of the planet, underpinning our growth plans. Each will be much more closely aligned with its respective customers and, through the integration of activities currently performed by DSM’s various scientific centers, will be fully equipped to rapidly develop impactful, science-based innovations (for more detail, see Innovation). We will continue to make acquisitions that strengthen and develop critical capabilities to support our organic growth.
At the same time, we have started a review of strategic options for our Materials businesses, including a possible change of ownership. For more detail, see the section on Materials.
Our business model for growth: global products, local solutions, and precision & personalization
Our Health, Nutrition & Bioscience strategy is underpinned by our ‘global products, local solutions’ business model and complemented by our growing competences in the rapidly emerging area of precision & personalization.
Our business model for growth: global products, local solutions, precision & personalization
Our leading, and growing, global product portfolio includes vitamins, nutritional lipids, carotenoids, minerals, eubiotics, enzymes and yeasts, as well as texturants, flavors and cultures. Our acquisition of First Choice Ingredients in 2021 added dairy-based savory flavorings for taste and functional solutions across a wide range of applications, while our acquisition of the flavor and fragrance (F&F) bio-based intermediates business of Amyris, Inc. expanded our Aroma portfolio. Bovaer® and our partnerships Avansya and Veramaris have recently been added through our own innovation efforts.
Delivering local solutions across all regions, our end-market focus allows us to better understand market needs, enable solution selling, and open up innovation headroom — for example, more relevant solutions supporting early life nutrition and dietary supplements in Health, Nutrition & Care. With a significant and diverse premix footprint, together with superior formulations and delivery systems and increasing competences, in analytics and diagnostics, we are able to develop innovative and sustainable local solutions for our customers around the world.
Drawing on our emerging capabilities in digitization, we are swiftly developing an additional dimension to our future growth: precision & personalization. Developments in data science and bioscience are opening up exciting opportunities to address challenges in health and nutrition. Leveraging our reputation, science-based competences and global customer base, we seek to create digital solutions that deliver unprecedented levels of precision. This new standard in precision has the capability to deliver more targeted and therefore, effective health solutions as well as measurable, sustainability benefits. Examples of this approach include:
- Hologram Sciences, Inc., our personalized nutrition venture, which brings together all the necessary capabilities to develop end-to-end turnkey solutions that are commercially validated with consumers
- Sustell™, a first-of-its-kind intelligent sustainability service that delivers accurate, simple and actionable farm-level solutions to reduce the environmental footprint and improve the profitability of animal farming
- Verax™, a data-driven, blood-based, biomarker-screening service that uses analytics to deliver a deeper and more accurate understanding of the health and performance of animals
