Finding the Sweet Spot in Formulations With Stevia
05 Jan 2015 | Cargill
ViaTech stevia-based sweeteners are high performance ingredients that help food and beverage manufacturers achieve optimal taste and sweetness at higher usage levels. With ViaTech ingredients, achieving sugar reduction of 50% or more in challenging applications, like carbonated soft drinks, with great taste is now possible. With a sensible cost-in-use and supply, creating reduced and zero-calorie stevia-based sweetened products consumers will love has never been easier.
This is Rob Wires at the HIE in Amsterdam, and I'm here with Andy Omas from Cargill, and Cargill are highlighting their new ViaTech technology, which is about finding this kind of sweet spot in the use of stevia extracts.
Andy, can you explain a bit about this technology and how it can be used?
Right, so, Cargill, you know, we've been involved with stevia for quite a while, and as our customers have tried to formulate with stevia, we found that as you push further and further into calorie reductions beyond 50%.
Some of the taste issues with stevia start to become more of an issue when formulating things like bitterness, linger, licorice aftertaste.
So Krager recognized this and by understanding all the individual components within the stevia leaf that are available to us and using them in the right combination, we're able to deliver a product that allows our customers to formulate to deeper calorie reductions without the bitterness linger licorice aftertaste that common.
Occurs with the higher reve products.
Now the high reve products still have a great place in the market in tabletops, and flavored waters and things like that, but this really allows us to unlock the full potential of stevia in various applications, everything from CSDs all the way to dairy applications.
Can you explain a bit about the R&D behind getting to this?
So 5 years ago, Cargill with the University of Munich actually purified each individually.
In the leaf, there's about 40 known glycosides.
There's 10 that are recognized by regulatory bodies.
We took those individually, purified them, tasted them to understand how sweet they were, how bitter they were, how much licorice aftertaste was attributed to each glycoside.
But what we found is that each one has a different attribute.
So now what if you use those in combinations?
It's not intuitive.
If you take two things that are sweet and put them together, it doesn't mean they're going to be twice as sweet or more sweet.
It actually can have suppression.
So we then take that data out of the University of Munich and did our own internal quantitative studies using the 9 different glycosides and various combinations and from all that data, which is a mountain of data, we developed a proprietary taste prediction model and that today's prediction model can then look at various glycosides and different combinations and really deliver that precision sweetness, that sweet spot where you get the most sweet with the least bitter and the least licorice.
In the portfolio via tech products were born.
OK, and in terms of applications, you're a little bit limited by the regulation in Europe.
Can you explain a bit about that?
Right, in Europe, there's there's different legislation than in the US for the use of stevia.
So our portfolio, we currently have 4 ingredients, one of which is approved for use in Europe.
And then the overall limit, the use of stevia in various ingredients, various products is around 250 BPM, for different ingredients.
So the amount of calorie reduction is somewhat limited here, but still the improvement from Biotech is quite noticeable.
OK, and you're showing a new a couple of applications here.
Can you explain a bit about that?
So, you know, like I mentioned before, when we first focused on this, we, we focused on CSD's, carbonated soft drinks, because it is one of the more difficult applications.
Be it a lemon lime or a cola, there's really no place to hide, and, and people are used to a certain taste.
So today we have a 50% calorie reduction using Viac.
It's sweetened with, Viac TS 900, and it's, it's quite good.
Swing by the booth and take a taste, but , it's very nice.
You don't, you, you don't get the, the linger, you don't get the bitterness.
You don't get the licorice aftertaste that that normally is associated when you start to push to this 50% calorie reduction.
The second is a tropical nectar.
This is also 50% calorie reduced.
There's no added sugar.
The sweetness is delivered from the fruit juice itself and TS 900 extract.
Again, you know, with fruit juices, sometimes you can get interactions with flavors, but with TS 900, it still tastes great.
It's great.
Andrew, thank you very much.
Thank you.
