Ted Harris : Well, thanks for the questions, Rom. We’ll try to remember all three of those. VitaCholine positioning, there’s no question that VitaCholine, which — for those of you who don’t know, is our branded Choline product that goes into the Human Nutrition market. And there’s no question it is the leading brand globally both from a market share perspective as well as technology perspective. And it’s less based on the physical attributes of the product itself and more based on the fact that we have multiple production facilities, one in Europe, one in the U.S. and the global position in this product. But really most importantly, just from a science based perspective, the studies that we have done with our branded product those Cornell studies were done with VitaCholine And really all of the studies that we’ve talked about over the years have been done with our VitaCholine.
And so when we approach our customers, when we approach the market, we’re clearly viewed as the technology leader, the science leader and the kind of the innovator, if you will — of the product. So we feel really good about the positioning of that brand and believe that as our customers innovate with Choline, include Choline and various new product launches, that they will choose to do that with our clear market leading brand. And you do find that many of those commercialized products will include our brand on their label, and we’re very proud of that. And I think that speaks to the value that our brand brings. Relative to the long-term direction, the growth of specialty price, we really were very pleased with the fourth quarter and it was a combination of both healthy growth in our performance gases business as well as our plant nutrition business.
So overall it was a good quarter for specialty products. And we really see that continuing certainly through the year. We feel that long term, the performance gases business, as we’ve said for years is a low-single digit type of growth business. But we’ve been in this time of recovery, this was one of the businesses that was hurt during the pandemic, a little bit of the opposite of the dietary supplement market that was benefited during the pandemic. And we’re seeing a little bit of a slowing as demand normalizes post pandemic similar here. This was hurt during the — but opposite, this was hurt during the pandemic. And we’re seeing a bounce in growth back to kind of pre pandemic type levels where we — and we’ll think we’ll get there in 2023.
So we see in that business, a combination of continued volume growth, a little bit higher than historical levels, plus growth from pricing that has been a result of all of the inflation of those products that we repackage and sell to the market. So we see healthy growth in performance gases, and we’re encouraged by the recent growth in plant nutrition that we delivered in Q4, and we believe that Plant Nutrition will have a very good year in 2023, fueled a bit by the new assets that we have put in place Europe. We are excited about that in Q4 with those assets. Our growth in Europe was particularly strong. So we do feel like we have made an investment in assets that will help to facilitate growth there. But our Plant Nutrition business should be a double-digit type of growth business, given the relatively small global market position, the efficacy of our products and the brand that we have.
