Tate & Lyle - Sustainable Agriculture

Tate & Lyle are a global provider of ingredients and solutions for the food, beverage and industrial markets, operating for over 160 years. They draw inspiration from three key ingredients: their purpose of Transforming Lives Through the Science of Food; technical expertise and deep understanding of the food and beverage market; and a portfolio of high-quality products and ingredients. Blend them all together, and they’ve got the right recipe to help manufacturers deliver on sweetness, texture, fibre enrichment and stabilisation to create products enjoyed by millions of people every day.

We needed to create an animated video that simply explains how Tate & Lyle’s sustainable agriculture programme with Truterra helps farmers in the US to operate more sustainably, alongside the benefits. They were keen to communicate the environmental impact they’re helping to achieve through the adoption of conservation practices at scale, how Tate & Lyle customers partnering with the programme are benefiting from being involved and how the programme is innovative and the customer offer is unique.

Due to Covid, their ability to film and interview participants in the programme is limited. They will make a key announcement around our sustainable agriculture programme this year – the first year-on-year results on how they’ve helped deliver environmental improvements on 1.5m acres of land and the explainer video would form part of that announcement. As they are a significant user of corn, which they use to make the majority of their ingredients, they developed a sustainable agriculture programme with their partner, Truterra, to help farmers in the US that produce corn to operate more sustainably. They do this by providing access to cutting-edge technology, which gives them visibility of how recommended conservation practices impact 100% of their land.

Our wizards set to work deep-diving into Tate & Lyle’s existing materials, research and speaking with key stakeholders. The narrative needed to include key messages, such as the challenge of climate change, the fact that a third of the world’s land is used for agriculture, the importance of maintaining healthy soil and how farmers can support soil health in different ways, all year round. Tate & Lyle also needed to focus on the impact they’ve made since launching the sustainable programme with Truterra by including clear statistics to back up their claims. With a robust process and collaboration at the heart of our process, we worked with T&L to develop clear messaging to ensure they were positioned as experts.

While the message is about climate change and the challenges we face with the agricultural industry and emissions, Tate & Lyle were keen to be positive about farmers’ efforts on sustainability to date and not vilify them. During the concept art phase, we worked closely with the team to find a balance between science/data and the people. Therefore, developing characters to reinforce the ‘people’ element, and intertwining data was a key focus. In addition, the primary audience would be US-based, so we needed to take into account recognisable US visuals for the farming and agriculture industry.

Storyboarding is arguably the most important stage in the production process when we bring the words and concept art together and plan the animation from start to finish. Think of it as a comic book strip with added notes on how scenes will transition and how characters will move and behave. With clear feedback along each stage, Tate & Lyle had ownership over the project all the way through. At the storyboard stage, we were able to make final tweaks to character styles, language and environments, before beginning production.

Our animation Wizards set about building the characters and developing the scenes for the production. With the storyboard agreed upon and a US-based voiceover artist selected and recorded, our team brought the animation to life. We not only produced an extended version for web and social, but we also produced 30-second versions, 15-second versions as well for use across social media.

As an additional effort to make sure the campaign was consistent across multiple platforms, we supplied Tate & Lyle with the character artwork to be used across print and digital materials.  We’re really proud to have been part of this campaign and are excited to be in the process of producing a new animation for a global corporate announcement.