Health, Nutrition & Care
Our markets

2024 was an exciting year of growth, consistently improved business performance, and bold strategic choices to elevate global health. We launched several new products and format innovations – and achieved significant new regulatory approvals, while accelerating progress on our synergy journey with our expanded HNC Taste organization.

HNC offers solutions for a range of markets, including early life nutrition, dietary supplements, pharmaceuticals, medical nutrition, and biomedical materials. We address specific nutritional and wellness needs with our direct-to-consumer i-Health business. We also serve the nutrition improvement sector, providing affordable and accessible nutrition fortification solutions for some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.

We serve these industries with a portfolio of high-quality vitamins, nutritional lipids, minerals, carotenoids, botanical nutraceuticals, digestive enzymes, postbiotics, probiotics and prebiotics (including human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs), active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), and a range of biomedical solutions.

Key market trends

• There is a gap of almost a decade between life span and health span – meaning that almost a decade of people’s lives is impacted by poor health
• Growing awareness around preventative and holistic approaches to health management (e.g., the interconnectedness of gut health, cognitive function, and overall well-being) is fueling demand for innovative self-care health products
• Consumers are seeking sustainable and evidence-based solutions; focusing on the environmental impact of producing ingredients, on which forms are better for them, and on how absorption of active ingredients impacts effectiveness
• Small, disruptive new brands, especially in the dietary supplements category, are enjoying strong growth

Performance

HNC delivered 2% volume growth during the year. Medical Nutrition, i-Health, and Biomedical performed well throughout the period. Dietary Supplements and Early Life Nutrition improved during the second half of the year, driving 5% volume growth in the period for the Business Unit, owing to good demand for algal omega-3 oils and Early Life Nutrition premix and HMOs.

The reported Adjusted EBITDA was down 5% from the previous year. Corrected for the negative foreign exchange effect and the divestment of the marine lipids activities (-10%), the underlying Adjusted EBITDA growth was up 5%.