Thierry Lecomte, Chairman of the Supervisory Board
The Tereos Group’s co-operative members share the core values of transparency, solidarity and fairness. Our strong and dependable co-operative model is built on these values.
Adjusted for a modern approach, the co-operative model allows co-operative members to meet the challenges of globalisation and market consolidation, whilst also benefiting from a strategy of diversification.
Our structure allows us to combine stability with a dynamic approach.
Tereos, a modern approach of co-operation
Tereos is a co-operative owned by 12,000 French sugar beet producers.
Its co-operative status obliges Tereos to provide the industrial and commercial extension of its co-operative members' operations, to improve their profitability and thus contribute to the sustainability of their agricultural businesses. Maximising value from agricultural production
Tereos undertakes to provide an outlet for the entire sugar beet output of its co-operative members and to expand its markets. This undertaking has become all the stronger since the reform of European sugar regime. Despite the reduction in sugar quotas and by taking advantage of new markets (alcohol, bioethanol, chemicals industry) Tereos has managed not only to maintain but to expand the acreage of sugar beet production handled by its factories. At the same time, its investments in starch, glucose and bioethanol have opened the way to the processing of nearly 3,6 million tonnes of cereals, mostly produced by French farmers. Market globalisation
This creation of value produces a financial return on the processing of sugar beet in the form of price supplements and from diversified businesses in the form of dividends. In the 1990s Tereos began a diversification programme that took it beyond its traditional markets and into the rest of the European Union, Brazil, Africa and the Indian Ocean. This successful diversification came in response to the globalisation of markets and the increase in the critical mass of customers and competitors.
