The quest for great tasting foods with as little sugar as possible has challenged formulators and product developers across categories in the food industry. Consumers have an unwavering love for sweet foods and drinks. Their fear of its physiological consequences is equally real and a compelling reason to reduce sugar in packaged foods. (For the purposes of this article, “sugar” refers to the primary caloric mono- and disaccharides fructose, glucose, and sucrose.)

With only a couple of exceptions, lower-and zero-calorie sugar alternatives have failed to live up to the multifaceted functionality and flavor of sucrose and its components, glucose and fructose. In fact, great taste remains one of the primary obstacles to overcome with the range of sugar alternatives cropping up in the marketplace. A close second, of course, is performance in a formulation.

The strategy to simply reduce or remove sugar is not realistic. The solution demands a paradigm shift that looks beyond the label. Consumers have a “love/hate” relationship with sugar. There also is much confusion about sugar; they recognize that it has a centuries-long history of safe use and trust it to be automatically risk-free because it’s found in nature. Sugar speaks to indulgence, and indulgence is irresistible—with resistance futile for many.

Yet consumers also are bombarded by messages from media and health professionals that coax them to fear sugar. This can backfire as well, though as it also stimulates desire of sugar as a forbidden ingredient. On top of this confusion, foods and beverages with sugar are an integral part of countless tradition and rituals.

The challenge for product formulators is to meet the demand for products with less sugar but make them as indistinguishable as possible from their full-sugar counterparts—a daunting challenge, to say the least!

1. Beyond the Sweet

Sugars—monosaccharides and disaccharides—are naturally present in fruits, vegetables, grains, milk, and honey and humans have consumed these for millennia as the intact part of the tissue matrix of these foods. The availability and sources of sugars in the diet increased markedly when humans started to extract sugars from their natural matrices to sweeten other foods and beverages. Along the way, they learned of its most notable function and its role in flavor, mouthfeel, and texture.

In addition to providing sweetness, sugar contributes to flavor by virtue of its biochemical properties, such as its involvement in Maillard reactions. But it also contributes to texture and structure, and even to preservation via its influence on water activity.

Sugar also enhances and balances tastes other than sweetness, including saltiness, sourness, and spiciness in less-sweet products and provides specific functionalities such as characteristic mouthfeel in beverages, and suppression of water activity in fruit and vegetable preserves.

It is this multifaceted functionality of sugar that makes sugar reduction an even more formidable challenge. Formulators recognize the need to consider every functional role of sugar in each application in order to replicate its functional and sensory appeals, and thus ensure meeting consumer expectations. This sounds simpler than it is.

2. Going Green

Previously, the focus on sugar reduction and elimination was almost entirely centered on artificial sweeteners that targeted a single note in the symphony of formulation: sweetness. The result was a toolbox of artificial sugar replacers, many of which, while aptly referred to as High Intensity Sweeteners (HIS), gave only sweetness without any of the subtle flavor notes sugar carries. In fact, some of them have distinct off-notes that must be masked.

This paradigm changed as consumers became more aware of the ingredients they ingest and were driven to reject such man-made chemicals, many of which became, rightly or wrongly, suspected of having deleterious effects on health. Some of those that survived the initial wave of anti-artificial sweetener sentiment have now fallen under the World Health Organization’s (WHO) new guidelines advising against their use. In fact, a division of WHO recently announced that the ubiquitous sweetener aspartame is “possibly carcinogenic.” Admitting that the declaration was based on “limited evidence,” the agency qualified that aspartame is “safe to consume within a certain limit.”

The past decade has seen the rise of natural, botanical sweeteners of all types and abilities flooding the market. These plant-derived sweeteners range from zero-calorie HIS products such as stevia and monkfruit to monosaccharides like unrefined plant sugars which offer only a slight reduction in calories but bring other advantages to the table.

Stevia and monkfruit (lo han guo) are perhaps the most common botanical sweeteners. Each of these, with sweetness coming from compounds called glycosides (rebaudiosides in stevia, mogrosides in monkfruit) is several hundred times the sweetness of sucrose. Although ingredient technology has the ability to rid them of most of their bitter or medicinal flavor notes, they still need to be coupled with bulkers—erythritol is among the most common one—for certain food formulations and some need to use masking agents as well.

3. Non-negotiables

Partial or total replacement with lower- or non-caloric sweeteners is the most common approach in both solid and liquid foods. This approach allows substantial reduction of the amount of sugar in the product but cannot deliver fully on the sensory profile and satiety value of sucrose. However, a viably simple strategy is to gradually and progressively reduce sugar so consumers notice only a slight difference in the sweetness of the products but gradually adapt to the changes.

Sugar replacement is a significantly fragmented approach with each product category being unique with distinct complexities. The nutritional rationale for reducing sugar is blurry at best and is driven in part by continual scrutiny from sources ranging from health experts who take a general approach that does not consider the incredible variation in nutritional needs across populations and misinformed online influencers. 

The default approach for reducing sugar includes reducing the amount of sugar while targeting a minimal change in the sensory profile. Formulators strive to match temporal aspects of sweetness which begs the question whether the baseline should be the current product or the original traditional product. The focus is on minimized change in sweetness perception—but the real opportunity is to reset the baseline and shift consumer preference toward less-sweet products.

4. Naturally Sweet, Plus

The market demand for healthier sweet foods has driven the replacement of refined sugar with natural, unrefined sugars from botanical sources. This is because they inherently contain bioactive compounds, minerals, fibers, antioxidants, and phytocompounds associated with anti-inflammatory and immune-boosting effects. They do, however, contain varying levels of calories, and some offer a modest reduction in total sugars.

For example, formulators can substitute sugar partially or wholly with date palm sugar. It’s a caloric sugar, sometimes mixed with maltodextrin, a polysaccharide derived from grain that, while only slightly less sweet than sucrose, also has prebiotic benefit. It also includes polyphenols and 5-8% dietary fiber. It can deliver a 10-12% reduction in total sugar content without affecting the sweetness of the finished product.

Coconut sugar is made by evaporating coconut sap. The result is a nutrient‐rich crystalline sweetener looks, tastes, dissolves, and melts almost exactly the same as sucrose but has a glycemic index value of 35 in contrast to palm sugar (GI value of 42) and sugarcane sugar (GI value of 58–82). The lower GI value of coconut sugar suggests it could be a better alternative to sugar, and it does not affect the taste or texture of the finished product.

Indian jaggery is obtained by evaporating water in sugarcane, as opposed to centrifugal separation. It is also known as panela (Latin America), kokuto (Japan), hakura (Sri Lanka), rapadura (Brazil), and desi gur (Pakistan). Jaggery is considered a more wholesome alternative to refined sugar because it contains 65–85% sucrose as compared to 99.5% in sugar, and 7–10% reducing sugars (glucose and fructose). It also contains 0.6% to 1.0% minerals while sugar contains only 0.05%.

Cocoa pulp offers a non-refined alternative with rustic appeal. Nestlé, S.A. has replaced refined sugar in chocolate with cocoa pulp for as much as 40% total sugar reduction in its 70% cocoa dark chocolates. The fiber in cocoa pulp, along with vitamins E, D, selected B vitamins, and magnesium, as well as polyphenols and flavonoids further enhance its health halo.

5. Rare Sugars

An emerging category is that of so-called “rare sugars.” These are sugars that exist in nature but in slight quantities. They are not fully digested and therefore provide fewer calories. These are attractive alternatives to sucrose because they occur in nature, have no off-flavors, and have a significantly low glycemic load.

Of the 50-plus rare sugars discovered in nature, D-allulose, D-tagatose, D-sorbose, and D-allose are the four that have been the most studied as sucrose substitutes. So far, D-allulose and D-tagatose are the only two that are generally recognized as safe (GRAS) by the FDA.

Allulose, produced by enzymatic conversion of fructose, is an epimer of fructose. It is GRAS in the U.S. and provides only 0.2-0.4 kcals/g versus 4 kcals/g for sucrose. Allulose is exempted from being labeled as a sugar and consumers like that it has a very low glycemic index and is non-cariogenic. Moreover, its flavor profile falls somewhere between that of sucrose and fructose, but it functions like sucrose when it comes to browning and bulking.

Allulose is listed as having only 70% the sweetness of sucrose, but it has a longer sweetness curve that, coupled with a tendency to elevate fruit and chocolate flavors, makes it a 1:1 drop-in for sucrose in many food formulations. It is more hygroscopic than sucrose and so less suitable for some products.

Tagatose is a monosaccharide isomer of fructose that occurs naturally in dairy and fruits. Produced commercially by isomerization of galactose from lactose, or by the enzymatic conversion of galactose, tagatose provides only 1.5 kcals/g.

Although labelled as a sugar currently, it has the potential to follow the precedence of allulose regulations and be exempted from sugar/added sugar regulation in the US Tagatose is about 20% absorbed and fully metabolized. Its digestive tolerance is comparable to allulose. It has a low glycemic index and is “tooth friendly.”

Replacing sugar with botanical sweeteners is far from a straightforward process. Each alternative is uniquely limited by either off-flavor(s) or lacking the temporal sensory profile of sucrose with sweetness either fading too fast or lingering too long. To date, allulose is the one that has shown the most promise due to its having a flavor and functionality so close to sucrose or crystalline fructose but with a negligible caloric load.

The market desire for “healthy” and “naturally” reduced sugar is only going to persist.

Successful sugar reduction strategies entail weaving sensory profiles with physiological effects. The sweetener systems derived from botanical sources so far have shown the most promise in accomplishing this herculean and sometimes daunting task.

Kantha Shelke, PhD, CFS, is a senior lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and principal of Corvus Blue, LLC, a Chicago-based food science and research firm specializing in industry competitive intelligence, expert witness services, and new product/technology development and commercialization of foods and food ingredients for health and wellness. Contact her at kantha@corvusblue.net.

Sticky Solutions
Honey and syrups, such as from maple, sorghum, agave, and even from sweet potatoes and other tubers have been used traditionally to sweeten foods for millennia. Some can be 1:1 drop-ins for sugar in many formulations, yet still offer a significant caloric deduction that ranges from around 20-40%, depending on the source and the process.

These natural plant-extracted sweeteners are seeing a resurgence in use due to the growing demand for “greener” and “healthier” sweetener options. Despite distinct taste back notes—some of which can actually enhance the flavor of a formulation—and inherent variability that depends on terroir and crop, these syrups act as an effective sucrose replacement.

They offer additional health benefits to both sweet indulgences and products already regarded as healthy foods or beverages. They also are available in powdered form to help formulators controlling color and texture.

● Sorghum syrup is a cost-effective partial or complete replacement of sugar and honey in baked good applications. It has the added benefit of acting as a browning agent in gluten-free versions.
● Maple syrup contains trace amounts of organic acids, free amino acids, protein, minerals, and phenolic compounds that distinguish its taste profile from that of sucrose but also give it a health halo that people believe. The density, clarity, color, and flavor of maple syrup range from light and just sweet to dark and complex.
● Agave nectar, extracted from the sap of several species of agave, is mostly fructose (60-90%) but it exhibits a sweetness profile very close to that of sucrose, while offering a lower glycemic index than sucrose. It experienced a boom in the 1980s and 1990s as a replacer for high-fructose corn syrup (which actually varies only slightly from sucrose as a 55-45% fructose:glucose blend) but slipped out of favor when that contradiction became widely understood. Recently, however, it has been experiencing something of a comeback.
● Malt syrups, from barley or wheat are similar to sorghum syrup in nutrient profile and come in an impressive range of colors and flavor notes. These syrups also allow for a reduction of about 25-30% of calories.

Sweet proteins
Protein-based sweeteners are an emerging class of alternatives to sugar. Seven types—brazzein, curculin, miraculin, monellin, thaumatin, mabinlins, and pentadin currently are being studied. Thaumatin is the most well-characterized to date. Thaumatins are a family of intensely sweet proteins—about 2,000 times as potent as sucrose—extracted from a plant native to Africa. Of the five known thaumatins, thaumatin I and II are the most abundant.

Beverage makers are cautious about using thaumatin because it interacts with some coloring agents and loses its sweetness intensity. At very low concentrations, thaumatin is a flavor enhancer, and particularly suitable for blending with other intense sweeteners and polyols.

Brazzein and monellin have limited commercial viability due to their high cost and instability. Miraculin and curculin do not have direct use as sugar substitutes but their flavor modifying properties can position them for improving the palatability of food products.

Development Pitfalls
Sweetness is in the taste buds of the “beholder,” so it is not a one-size-fits-all. Sweetness also depends on the application and how the product is consumed, i.e., hot or cold. The first question to consider in formulating or reformulating for lower sugar is if the sugar replacement will be approached as a “square one” or a “reformulation” exercise and if the change is for functional vs. optics-driven reasons.

It is important to note unique challenges relevant to the source and supplier of the ingredient. Moreover, in addition to supply chain considerations, it is important to take into account the cost of substantiation and litigation should the ingredient not deliver on its promise. In some cases, the cost of achieving functional parity can be quite difficult and expensive. Calculate accordingly!

New products, once based on technical information, are now driven by esoteric and ephemeral consumer philosophies and developing these kinds of products require a different set of skills and a different approach.

Sugar Reduction Quick-Take
Reducing sugar content in foods can be accomplished using one or more of the following strategies:

• Substituting some or all sugar(s) with other sweeteners
• Reducing sugar without adding other sweeteners (an option that is gaining ground, as consumers may mistrust other sweeteners)
•  Using technology to enhance the perception of sweetness and overall sensory profile