Recently several food and beverage trade magazines have featured articles about high intensity sweetener trends during the coronavirus pandemic.  Sweetener producers say that the pandemic has promoted extremely high demand for artificial sweeteners with CPG customers doubling or tripling orders.  Stevia and monkfruit remain popular, but both can have perceivable off notes associated with melon rind and licorice respectively as well as changes to mouthfeel.  Allulose seems to be gaining popularity with consumers and can be combined with monkfruit to create a label friendly sweetener that does not sacrifice taste.  One trend is the blending of multiple high intensity sweeteners to create the taste and mouthfeel offered by nutritive sweeteners such as sugar and honey.

Erythritol remains popular and can also be blended with stevia.  This blend is particularly useful for baked goods, because the erythritol extends shelf life by reducing moisture activity.  It is expected that there will be a non-nutritive replacement for brown sugar introduced in the sweetener market later this year.  Inclusions such as no sugar added chocolate chips are also a growing market with the keto diet and clean labeling as drivers.

Now that several studies have concluded a link between the severity of Covid-19 and obesity, many more consumers are looking to cut sugars and carbohydrates from their diets and generally eat healthier.  Decernis captures the sweetener regulations for 222 countries in our gComply database and also offers customized consulting to support the use of unique sweetener blends.

Posted on 21 September 2020