IN Brief:
- BGG Group has appointed Bharadhwaj “Bharat” Ramamoorthy as CEO of BGG Europe and Head of the International Division.
- He succeeds Jürgen Nelis, who becomes Chairman of the BGG Europe board after leading the Swiss headquarters launch.
- The appointment supports BGG’s international expansion across botanical, microalgae, enzymatic, and natural ingredient platforms.
BGG Group has appointed Bharadhwaj “Bharat” Ramamoorthy as CEO of BGG Europe and Head of the International Division, placing the company’s operations outside China and Japan under new executive leadership.
Ramamoorthy succeeds Jürgen Nelis, who becomes Chairman of the BGG Europe board. Nelis led the launch of BGG’s European headquarters in Switzerland in 2024 and oversaw expansion of the company’s teams and operations in Europe and the United States.
Ramamoorthy has been associated with BGG since 2023 and became a company director in 2025 to support strategy. His background includes leadership, finance, strategy, and merger and acquisition experience from flavour and fragrance group Givaudan, as well as a director role with Keva Group in Europe.
Founded in China in 1995, BGG supplies natural ingredients across supplements, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, personal care, and food and drink. Its capabilities include microalgae, enzymatic extraction, and botanical extraction, while its portfolio includes AstaZine astaxanthin, TheraPrimE tocotrienols, ThinOgen fucoxanthin, ApplePhenon apple extract, Vitosa stevia, and licorice extracts.
The appointment gives BGG a clearer structure for international expansion at a point when food and drink manufacturers are reformulating around natural sweeteners, antioxidant systems, plant extracts, colour-adjacent ingredients, and health-positioned actives. These ingredients are no longer niche additions for premium products alone. They increasingly sit inside sugar-reduction programmes, active nutrition launches, functional beverages, and products positioned around plant-derived formulation.
Natural ingredients can create practical manufacturing challenges, particularly where taste, solubility, colour, stability, or dosage changes affect the finished product. Stevia and botanical sweeteners can introduce bitterness or lingering notes; microalgae-derived ingredients may need careful handling in colour-sensitive applications; and botanical extracts need consistent specification if they are to work across industrial-scale production.
Controlled and specialised production routes are becoming more important as manufacturers look for ingredients that can be scaled without relying entirely on conventional crop extraction. Lallemand’s fermentation-derived vanillin launch shows a similar direction in flavour supply, where bakery, dairy, confectionery, and cereal manufacturers are using controlled production to secure consistent ingredient quality.
The same pressure is visible in sweeteners. Ingredion’s approach for Tate & Lyle reflected the strategic value now attached to speciality ingredient systems, particularly where sweetening, texture, fibre, and nutrition need to be solved together rather than through single raw materials.
BGG’s international growth will depend on how effectively it combines ingredient production with application support in Europe and North America. Manufacturers want naturalness, but they also want documented origin, technical service, regulatory support, and stable cost-in-use. Ramamoorthy takes over the international division as those requirements become more demanding, particularly across categories where reformulation is moving faster than traditional ingredient supply models.
