By most measures, stevia has become a gradual smash hit, a nearly perfect storm convergence of features when it comes to sweeteners. It is sweet, very sweet; up to 300 times sweeter than sugar. It's low in calories; in fact, its calories are negligible, along with its effect on insulin secretion. And it's natural. The sweet leaves of the stevia plant (a member of the sunflower family) have been used as a sweetener for decades in many countries before stevia extracts entered the U.S. sweetener market.
The sweet and low- or no-cal attributes have been givens probably forever in the non-nutritive sweetener game. Taste was a trade-off most dieters have been willing to make. But truly natural was never an option until stevia. And it has been a huge part of that sweetener's success.
Playing that same card is the next big sweetener to hit the market. A fruit of the herbaceous perennial vine Siraitia grosvenorii, native to southern China and northern Thailand, is called by several names, including luo han guo, Buddha fruit or, more recently, monk fruit.
Known in traditional Chinese medicine as a sweetener for cooling drinks and used to treat obesity and diabetes, monk fruit contains fructose and glucose as natural sugars. But it's the mogrosides, compounds similar to those that sweeten stevia, that make the monk fruit up to 300 times as sweet as sugar.
BioVittoria Ltd. was an early advocate of the sweetener. The New Zealand-based company claims to have locked up 90 percent of the world's supply of monk fruit.
A variety of plant proteins can provide the chemistry of sweetness. The "naturalness" of plants as a source and the friendly labeling are gaining a great deal of recent attention among product developers, marketers and consumers.
Hot on the heels of the stevia and monk fruit revolution is a sweetener derived from the West African fruit of the climbing plant Oubli, Pentadiplandra brazzeana Baillon. Oubli has been long recognized by natives of the Gabon Republic, a sovereign state on the west coast of Central Africa, and Cameroon for its sweetness. The sweet compound is called brazzein, and is an extracellular protein found in the pulp surrounding the seeds of the berry.
First isolated as an enzyme by researchers at the University of Wisconsin in 1994, the super-sweet protein is now expressed in bacteria in order to lower the cost of production and eliminate the need for farming. After sequencing the DNA that codes for brazzein, researchers could use bacteria as little cellular factories that churn out the highly sweet protein.
The newly formulated final product will be marketed under the name Cweet by Natur Research Ingredients, Los Angeles. Boasting a sweetening power 1,000 times that of sucrose, Cweet is promoted as a natural, easily dissolved and heat-stable sweetener that leaves no aftertaste. Stability at high temperatures makes the sweetener appropriate for baked applications as well as beverages. Since it's a protein, it weighs in at 4 calories per gram, but with a 1,000:1 replacement value for sucrose, it is essentially zero calories.
In the category of naturally sweet, but not "super sweet," oats have entered the sweetener market. Using a patented proprietary natural process that took 10 years to develop, Oat Tech, Lincoln, Neb., introduces OatSweet, a new nutritive sweetener made entirely from oats and water using a natural process. Functionally similar to brown rice syrup, with comparable binding properties and texture, OatSweet finds application as diverse as bars, baked goods and cereals to beverages, ice creams, confections and candies.
Because its source is whole grain, OatSweet is a perfect match for cereal applications. OatSweet is not an extracted compound, so it is not in the super-sweet category, and thus provides a taste more sugar-like because it is in fact a carbohydrate sweetener. Since there are no commercial GMO oats at this time, it is also a non-GMO product. It is a source of calories, though allows about 15 percent savings of calories at 3.3 calories per gram compared to 4 calories per gram for fructose, dextrose, sucrose and other conventional sugars. Given the reputation of oats, OatSweet is compatible with the values of the natural products consumer.
It's vertically integrated, supplying its own seedlings to Chinese farmers who are contracted to supply the company. The seedlings are the optimized result of natural plant breeding, not genetic modification, emphasizes Paul Paslaski, vice president of sales and marketing in the U.S. office in Libertyville, Ill. BIoVittoria then processes the monk fruit extract into a powder, which is then sent through distributors around the world. It buys no monk fruit on the open market, he says.
Actually, it's not an extract, Paslaski claims. "Since it comes from a fruit, it basically starts as a juice," he explains. Only water is used in the extraction/processing. The mogrosides are separated from the fresh-pressed juice of the monk fruit that contains carbohydrate sources, fructose and glucose. And that could be a key advantage over stevia. A true "natural" claim for some stevia could be questioned, as some suppliers of that plant-based sweetener use solvents to extract the steviol glycosides.
Paslaski also notes that while most of the current interest in monk fruit is due to its sweetening ability, there are several other bioactives in the fruit that could become valuable and marketed ingredients down the road.
BioVittoria's first milestone was the January 2010 notification from the FDA that its Fruit-Sweetness-branded monk fruit concentrate is GRAS (generally recognized as safe). Then came a partnership with London-based Tate & Lyle PLC, with U.S. headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Ill., which resulted in Tate & Lyle buying an equity stake in the company and becoming the exclusive distributor worldwide.
Tate & Lyle launched industrial products under the name Purefruit and just recently supplied BioVittoria's monk fruit to McNeil Nutritionals LLC, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary, for Nectresse, a consumer/tabletop sweetener that is just rolling out nationally. It's advertised as a combination of monk fruit extract and other natural sweeteners including erythritol, a sugar alcohol that is fermented from sugars present in many vegetables and fruits.
That Tate & Lyle-McNeil deal parallels the partnership the two companies have for Splenda, McNeil's consumer brand for the London company's sucralose.
Blue California, Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif., also sees great potential, and earlier this year debuted its BlueSweet monk fruit extract. "It's a really good product but has a different profile than stevia," explains Cecilia McCollum, executive vice president.
She notes that interest is keeping the price high, so Blue California is experimenting with fermentation production of the mogroside, instead of extraction, which the company successfully did with stevia. "That would increase the yield, lower the price, ensure availability and control the purity of each batch," she adds.
At a November ingredient show, U.S. Niutang Chemical Inc., Chino, Calif., provided samples of a monk fruit sweetener. Tentatively called Fruit20 and Fruit50, denoting the percentages of the mogroside, Niutang has aligned itself with a highly regarded Chinese manufacturer. Niutang is just getting started marketing the new sweetener. It has a large portfolio of non-nutritive sweeteners, including sucralose, aspartame, acesulfame potassium, stevia and erythritol.
"Monk fruit has a different taste than sugar, as does stevia," says Nancy Hughes, vice president of of sales and marketing. But she notes it has less of an aftertaste than even the purest forms of stevia. "Monk fruit is very new to this market. It's being welcomed by companies who make natural food products. But it will take time for more product developers to fine-tune it and consumers to accept it," she says.
Just like stevia.
