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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Nucane

Nutrition Innovation Raises $5M to Improve Sugar

Nutrition Innovation announced yesterday that it has raised a $5 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by VisVires New Protein, with participation from Enerfo Group (h/t to PE Hub).

Singapore-based Nutrition Innovation makes Nucane, which the company touts as a healthier way to produce sugar. As we wrote about the company last year:

Nutrition Innovation uses near-infrared scanning technology to understand the composition of the raw sugar cane coming into the mill. Based on this analysis, Nutrition Innovation’s algorithms tell the mill how to alter its refinement process (crushing, washing, drying, etc.) in order to produce a better sugar product.

The result is Nucane, which retains minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium, and has a lower glycemic index than traditional white refined sugar. Godfrey says Nucane also creates less of a sugar “spike” and provides a more sustained release of energy after consumption.

The company markets Nucane as a “healthier” because it is not refined and has this lower glycemic index. We aren’t nutritionists or scientists so we can’t back up this claim, but since Nucane is made from sugar, it still tastes like sweet stuff, and Nutrition Innovation says Nucane can be swapped into recipes 1 for 1. This is key because Nucane is a B2B play, with industrial sugar mills being Nutrition Innovation’s customers. A mill can sell this Nucane’s “healthier” sugar to food producers, which can use it without having to alter or retrofit existing recipes.

When we last checked in with Nutrition Innovation, the company had an agreement with Australia’s Sunshine Sugar to offer Nucane to commercial buyers, and was in trial with roughly 50 companies around testing Nucane in various food and beverage brands.

No Substitute: Three Ways Science is Putting a New (and Improved) Spin on Sugar

Though companies have come up with various sugar substitutes over time, none have overthrown the king (and those substitutes might create their own problems). If you can’t beat ’em, you may as well use science to get down on the molecular level and join ’em.

Companies around the world are using various techniques not to replace sugar, but to change the way the substance is made or processed in the hopes of creating a better type of sugar. One that can be incorporated into the products we know, love, and crave, but doesn’t require as much of the sweet stuff.

Quartz has a story out today on DouxMatok, an Israeli startup that is combining sugar with food-grade silica to create a “sweeter sugar.” Evidently, sugar isn’t very good at hitting our taste buds, so food makers cram products full of it to attain their desired level of sweetness. A straightforward reduction in the amount of sugar in a product, then, is difficult to do without sacrificing taste.

DouxMatok gets around this by leveraging silica, which has lots of nooks and crannies that sugar molecules can fill. The sugar-packed silica diffuses more efficiently on our tongues, so food companies can use 40 percent less sugar in their products, without sacrificing the taste. The Quartz piece included a metaphor to help explain:

“Imagine 100 people in a house, each one holding a spoonful of sugar. If you ask them to go from room to room and then deposit the sugar into a jar, some will inevitably drop and spill sugar along the way. This is essentially what happens when you bite into a slice of normal cake. Now imagine one person in the house holding a sealed plastic bag containing the same amount of sugar. They’ll likely get to the jar without spilling any of it. The silica DouxMatok uses operates like the plastic bag.”

The startup just announced a partnership with European sugar company, Südzucker, to manufacture and commercialize Doxmatok’s sugar reduction process.

But Douxmatok isn’t the only company noodling with sugar molecules. Earlier this year, Nestlé unveiled a new sugar reduction technology of its own. They created a process of spraying sugar, powdered milk and water into hot air, which made the sugar develop microscopic holes. When this hole-y sugar hits your tongue, it still tastes as sweet — but all the holes means there’s less of it.

Nestlé debuted the new sugar structure in the Milkybar Wowsome (only available in Europe), which had 30 percent less sugar than comparable bars. The company said back in March that if it catches on (read: fools people well enough), the company will expand the technology into more chocolate brands.

Nutrition Innovation, on the other hand, is taking less of an atomic approach when making its traditional sugar replacement: Nucane. Instead, the company applies near-infrared scanning to raw sugar cane coming into a mill to alter the processing of it (crushing, washing, drying, etc.).

The result of these altered processing techniques is Nucane, which keeps minerals like calcium and potassium, which occur naturally in sugar, but has a lower glycemic index than traditional white refined sugar. Nutrition Innovation says Nucane provides more sustained energy after consumption compared to a sugar spike. Bonus: it can be swapped into existing recipes 1 for 1.

Nutrition Innovation entered into an agreement with Australia’s Sunshine Sugar to sell its Nucane to industrial sugar buyers, and the product is currently being tested by different companies around the world.

Ideally, these new scientific approaches to sugar will live up to their promises and spur even more innovation and investment. If we’re able to enjoy all the sweets with less sugar, the result would be pretty sweet.

Sweet! Nucane Reduces Refinement to Try and Improve Sugar

Though it sounds like a hardcore street narcotic in some rain-soaked cyberpunk noir story (apologies, I’ve been binging Altered Carbon), Nucane, a new sugar product, is actually quite sweet. And if it works as promised, the sweetest part could be a new industrial approach to making sugar… I don’t want to say “healthier,” but at least less bad for you.

Nucane is a product of Nutrition Innovation, a startup that works with sugar mills to change the way they refine sugar. The big problem with sugar, Nutrition Innovation CEO, Matthew Godfrey told me, is how it is processed and turned into the white sugar we are all familiar with.

Nutrition Innovation uses near-infrared scanning technology to understand the composition of the raw sugar cane coming into the mill. Based on this analysis, Nutrition Innovation’s algorithms tell the mill how to alter its refinement process (crushing, washing, drying, etc.) in order to produce a better sugar product.

The result is Nucane, which retains minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium, and has a lower glycemic index than traditional white refined sugar. Godfrey says Nucane also creates less of a sugar “spike” and provides a more sustained release of energy after consumption.

Because it’s made from sugar, Nucane can be swapped into existing recipes 1 for 1, meaning food producers don’t have to retrofit recipes. According to Godfrey, their product is also very consistent, like white sugar, and consistency is important to food manufacturers who don’t want variations in the taste of their product.

Nutrition Innovation’s customers are sugar mills that can then offer Nucane as a sugar alternative to its buyers. Because the refinement happens at the mill, Godfrey says Nucane offers convenience by removing an intermediate step for bulk sugar buyers. For example, a Canadian company buying bulk sugar from Brazil does not have to then get that raw sugar processed somewhere else before adding it to their products.

Though he wouldn’t provide specifics, Godfrey says this benefit helps make Nucane stay “competitive in pricing.” Nutrition Innovation signed an agreement Australia’s Sunshine Sugar in September of last year for Sunshine to offer Nucane to its industrial sugar buyers. In addition to that, Godfrey says that “forty to fifty” companies around the world are currently testing Nucane in various food and beverage brands.

A big barrier to entry for Nucane will be the innate human resistance to change. Large brands don’t like messing with recipes and consumers hate it when their product starts tasting different. Though Nucane apparently tastes very similar to traditional refined sugar, fear of change could pose a challenge as Nutrition Innovation tries to scale itself. The company has received an undisclosed round of seed funding and its next goal is to expand globally into sugar producing geographies such as Thailand, Latin America and Africa.

Nucane is just the first of many “sugar solutions” Nutrition Innovation will be offering. With adult obesity rates hitting record highs, it doesn’t take a hard-boiled detective from the future to deduce that we must find ways to solve the complications that come with our love of sugar. And who knows? Maybe one answer might be in sugar itself.

You can hear about Nucane in our daily spoon podcast.  You can also subscribe in Apple podcasts or through our Amazon Alexa skill.