Enhancing sweetness perception using odor and flavor components
20 Dec 2018 | Treatt
Treatt is seeking to enhance the perception of sweetness with odor components and improve flavor and mouthfeel with 100 percent natural solutions. These contain no sugar, calories or coloring making them convenient as well as effective to formulate with, says the company which presented a range of craft, tea and sugar reduced beverage concepts on the Food Matters Live, in London. Speaking to FoodIngredientsFirst, Charlotte Catignani, the company’s Research and Development Manager, says the drive and interest towards natural sweeteners is growing. “One advantage of our capabilities in this space, is that we can work with any high-intensity sweeteners, natural or artificial, and make them taste much more like sucrose of fructose depending on the level of sweetness needed,” she says.
This is Elizabeth Green.
I'm at Food Matters Live 2018.
I'm with Charlotte Catignani, who's from Treat, and Treat are sort of exhibiting their sugar reduction solutions.
So Charlotte, maybe you can walk us through some of the concepts that you have on the stand.
Yes, what we're demoing for our sugar reduction range.
We have a, a lemon lime carbonated soft drink very similar to the sort of thing that you get on the supermarket shelves.
This one is sweetened with a bit of sugar and then also some stevia because we know that most of the people that will come into the show have a real drive for natural natural sweetness.
So that's a, that's a fairly nice drink in itself, but it does have those, that flavor profile that you associate with stevia, so a slightly slower onset with the sweetness and then it linger with bitterness and licorice at the end.
So what we've done is we've taken that drink that we developed and we've modified it.
This product here, we have put on top of that drink, our treat suit to 9866, which was newly launched in the summer.
That product has a sort of white sugar kind of character, and what it does is when you add it to the control, it gives a more sugar-like flavor, rounds out the steam and makes it much more like sugar.
And that's what, that's what we want these products to do.
You can work with any high intensity sweeteners, natural, like we've chosen today, or artificial.
Much, much more like either or fructose.
OK, fantastic.
So obviously that's one of the biggest challenges, isn't it, with stevia is the sort of off notes and yeah, what other challenges are you seeing in terms of like sugar reduction?
Just bringing the sugar down.
With the with the soft drinks industry levy, you know, if you're talking about something like this which traditionally would be 10% sugar, to completely skip that tax, you have to carve the sugar in there, so that can be quite a challenge.
So it really is down to the manufacturers as to how much they want to reduce that sugar and where they want to.
In that particular space and obviously the sugar, the sugar tax has taken a big role this year in the soft drinks industry in particular.
How have you sort of responded then in effect to that?
We've been working in this space for quite some time.
Some of the products that we offer in this range were actually developed 10 years ago.
But we have seen a flurry of activity.
We saw that about 18 months ago now.
People started to really push to reformulate in time for the deadline, but for our customers, these large manufacturers, they've been reformulating for years.
They've made these global commitments to cut calories.
So they've been looking at this for a very long time.
So the sugar tax has caused a little spike of interest for us, but it's been an ongoing topic.
Yeah, definitely.
And in terms of the flavor concepts that maybe you can expand a bit more on that because I think that's a really interesting area.
Yeah.
OK.
What the beauty of what we do is because we, we provide flavor and fragrance ingredients, all the flavors that we put into these demos that we make ourselves come from us.
So we have a lemon and lime flavor here because we're experts in citrus.
I really know our citrus very.
So we've put the lemon.
We also have a really nice demo here.
So this one, it's a sparkling white tea, so it's really quite innovative.
We're calling this our craft soda, but it's also noted with orange and gain, speaking to our expertise in citrus.
Commonly associated with earl grain tea that actually goes really, really nicely in this craft soda and it's not very sweet either.
We're addressing that market trend of reduced palate for really sweet drinks, but this one's lovely, really nice with a bit of gin we also we have a green bell pepper, cucumber and lime flavored water.
So again, you know.
Addressing that rehydration trend, not too sweet and also not fizzy in this one.
We developed the, the bell pepper and the cucumber lime all by stripping out the aromas from the actual.
OK, so all really interesting sort of flavor concepts.
What do you think will be sort of popular and trending then going into 2019 in terms of flavors?
We're seeing interesting in terms of citrus in particular, we're seeing things like.
Also really interesting lemons as , things like there's a, there's a lemon called the tiger lemon and the pink.
Lemon that's inside is Indian citrus is quite interesting as.
I don't know, going back to gin again, it says a lot.
Tanaray have a gin with rank or lime.
That rank or lime is actually it's actually much more lime than orange.
It's a very interesting citrus flavor.
And then, tea is, is getting more and more.
Shelf space.
It's very interesting and it's refreshing and people like the function.
So are there any other areas of innovation that Treat will be working on then going into next year?
We'll be continuing this line.
We're always developing new products.
We're always on the lookout for citrus and then also because we because of our distillation process for new fruits and vegetable extracts, we're always looking for those fruits.
That's great, Charlotte.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
