Sweetness By Any Other Name

The New York Times recently ran an article about Stevia, the latest competition in the $1.2-billion-a-year low-cal sweetener industry. An extract from the leaves of the stevia plant, it was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration as a food supplement in 1995, and then in December was given the green light to be added to food and beverage management.

Because it comes from a plant, marketers can call it a natural sweetener and package it in green, allowing companies to tap into two powerful markets through the nutrition panel at once: natural ingredients and low-calorie products.

Almost half of all American households use some kind of no-calorie sweetener, according to 2007 figures compiled by Packaged Facts, a market research firm. And the challenge is built around customer loyalty to their pink Sweet’N Low saccharin, blue Equal aspartame or yellow Splenda sucralose.

“The question is, do people feel strongly enough about a natural sweetener versus the sweeteners they have been using for however many years and have a strong affinity to, based on certain flavor profiles,” said Gary Karp, executive vice president of Technomic, a market research firm. It’s anybody’s guess, he said.

Their loyalty probably also comes from health claims of the various products, but researchers are now studying through foods research whether artificial sweeteners trigger a negative metabolic response that actually causes people to gain weight. In addition, saccharin was linked with cancer (until 2000), health advocates say sucralose can’t be easily processed by the body, and holistic health practitioners link aspartame to a host of conditions including neurological damage. In contrast, stevia extracts just haven’t been studied enough.

Now in an attempt to come closer to the taste of sugar, without the calories, manufacturers are blending sweeteners, sometimes with real sugar. Only proper food sensory research will be able to say if that will work for the consumer.