The food engineer who spent three decades learning why cutting sugar is hard, then helped build a way to do it.
Kelly Thompson's job at Incredo was unusual for a food executive: convince manufacturers who buy sugar by the ton to use far less of it - without asking shoppers to notice.
Incredo, the company formerly called DouxMatok, makes an ingredient called Incredo Sugar. It is not an artificial sweetener and not a sugar substitute in the usual sense. It is real cane or beet sugar, engineered so that more of the sweetness reaches your taste receptors. The result, the company says, is the ability to cut sugar in a recipe by up to half while keeping the taste people expect.
Thompson joined the company in January 2022 to run its North American business, was promoted to Co-CEO and Chief Commercial Officer in 2023, and later stepped into the CEO seat. Her mandate through those years was commercialization: taking a technology that had earned headlines and turning it into orders, partnerships and product on shelves.
Under her, Incredo moved production to full commercial scale in Austin, Texas, and in 2024 launched a concentrated second-generation version, Incredo Sugar G2, made of real sugar and protein. It works at roughly 1 to 2 percent of a formulation - closer to a micro-ingredient than a bulk sweetener - and cleared the FDA with a "no questions" letter on its GRAS notice.
It maintains taste, because it's real sugar, clean label, and it helps them reduce overall sugar consumption.
"Our aim when working with food manufacturers to achieve their sugar reduction goals is to offer a solution that suits their specific needs."
Thompson did not arrive at Incredo from a startup accelerator. She came from the inside of big food. Trained as a food engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she built a career in research, development and quality - the technical roles that decide whether a product actually works, and the ones that rarely get applause.
Her resume runs through some of the largest names in the industry: Kraft Foods, WhiteWave Foods, and Continental Mills, where she served as senior vice president of R&D and quality. That grounding in how food is actually formulated and manufactured is what she brought to a company trying to reinvent one of its most basic ingredients.
The move mirrored a broader shift in the food business - away from replacing familiar products and toward quietly reformulating them, so a chocolate bar or a gummy still tastes like itself with less sugar inside.
The pitch Thompson carried to manufacturers has three parts, and they fit together like a recipe.
First, it is real sugar - cane or beet - so a label can still say "sugar" rather than a chemistry-set name. Second, it delivers the same sweetness and sensory profile with no aftertaste, which is where artificial sweeteners have historically lost consumers. Third, because so little is needed, a maker can cut total sugar meaningfully while keeping the mouthfeel and browning that sugar provides in baked goods, chocolates, spreads and gummies.
She has described the G2 version less as a substitute and more as a micro-ingredient: a small amount that carries the sweetness of the sugar that remains. It is the kind of distinction that sounds subtle and turns out to be the whole business model.
Figures reflect the company's stated up-to-50% reduction and 1-2% usage level, not a specific product formulation.
It delivers the same sweetness and sensory profile of sugar with no aftertaste.
Our aim when working with food manufacturers to achieve their sugar reduction goals is to offer a solution that suits their specific needs.