Cargill Launches Stevia-Based Sweetener With Desirable Taste

01 Oct 2015 --- Food ingredients processor Cargill is to launch its answer to demands for a sweetener that satisfies consumer health without sacrificing great taste. EverSweet, which Cargill developed with Swiss innovative ingredient producer Evolva. is made using the age-old process of fermentation and a specially crafted baker’s yeast to produce sweet steviol glycosides that are identical to Reb M & Reb D, the sweetest molecules found in the stevia leaf.

Cargill will officially launch EverSweet at next week’s SupplySide West in Las Vegas, US.

Scott Fabro, global business development director, Cargill: “We are excited about the new market spaces that EverSweet opens up. It offers a new, delicious choice for reduced and zero calorie food and beverages and can help our customers to achieve deep sugar reduction, even go to 100% sugar reduction.”

There have traditionally been two main problems with using stevia as a sweetener. Firstly, sweet as it is, it cannot be used on its own to sweeten food and beverages - it has to used in conjunction with another sweetener such as sugar, which means it cannot carry a zero calorie claim. Secondly, Stevia has quite a lingering off-taste, which many consumer find undesirable. Cargill and Evolva have managed to combat both these issues. 

As well as the leaf, the stevia plant makes stevia sweeteners (for example, Reb D and Reb M) that do not have this taste problem. The plant makes them in very low amounts, well below a concentration of 1%, so achieving commercial volumes of finished product would require planting, growing, harvesting and extracting an extraordinary amount of stevia plants from vast tracts of land which in turn makes them prohibitively expensive.

By making these better-tasting sweeteners using yeast fermentation, Cargill and Evolva have enabled Reb D and Reb M to be made on a large scale with a commercially viable cost of goods. This approach also provides a simpler, shorter and safer supply chain than traditional cultivation, processing and refining of plants.

Based on these advantages, Cargill and Evolva believe that fermentation-derived stevia ingredients have the potential to accelerate the adoption of stevia-based sweeteners, significantly expanding the market potential.

EverSweet sweetener provides consumers the great taste they crave with better sweetness intensity, faster sweetness onset and improved sweetness quality – without the bitterness or off-note aftertaste common with other stevia sweeteners.

“We’ve been talking about our Reb M & Reb D sweetener for months, and we are excited to give people the opportunity to taste and see for themselves how good it is,” added Henstrom.

On its website, Evolva, who has collaborated with Cargill on this project says: Based on market data compiled by Mirabaud Securities (2014) and LMC International (2014), various third-party data and internal market forecasts, Evolva estimates that the total addressable market for its stevia product is around $4bn. This market size is considerably in excess of the current stevia market (estimated at around $100-200m at the ingredient level), but is in turn a small fraction of the total sweetener market (estimated at some $60-70bn).

EverSweet next-generation sweetener is expected to be commercially available in 2016.