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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

sugar

DouxMatok to Scale Production of Its Sugar Tech in N. America with Lantic

There’s good news for people in the U.S. who like sweets but want to reduce their sugar intake. Israeli startup DouxMatok announced today that its not-a-sugar-substitute will be mass produced by sugar manufacturer Lantic here in North America starting next year.

As you are probably well aware, we eat a lot of added sugar in our foods here in the U.S., and that is a problem. Too much sugar can have deleterious effects on the body including heart and liver problems.

DouxMatok’s technology aims to reduce our sugar intake without sacrificing the taste of sugar. But the company is not creating a sugar substitute. Instead, its approach is to make sugar more efficient when it hits our tongue. It does this by attaching sugar molecules to another edible substance. Originally, the company used silica, which, as we covered back in 2018:

[Silica] 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.

Since then, DouxMatok has updated its technology, replacing silica with an undisclosed odorless, calorie-free mineral that the company said is more effective.

The result, according to DouxMatok, is that food companies can still use sugar in their recipes, they just don’t need to use as much.

DouxMatok signed a similar deal with European sugar company Südzucker back in 2018. With today’s announcement, DouxMatok’s Incredo Sugar, as it is branded, will be made available at industrial volumes for food companies here in North America. Lantic is only handling the manufacturing and production, with DouxMatok doing all of the sales and marketing of its Incredo Sugar.

DouxMatok is one of a number of companies taking a technological approach to fighting the scourge of sugar. Nestlé has a process that restructures sugar particles to maintain sweetness at lower volumes. Joywell is creating plant-based alternatives to sugar through fermentation. And Nutrition Innovation creates sugar with a lower glycemic index through different refinement processes.

As someone who enjoys a fun-sized Snickers (or two) as an afternoon pick me up, these types of sugar improvements can’t come soon enough. DouxMatok says that products using its Incredo Sugar will be on store shelves here in the U.S. by the second half of 2021.

UPDATE: This post originally stated that the new version of DouxMatok’s sugar uses a clean label fiber. This fiber-based version is actually still under development, and the mineral-based product will be what hits North America.

Nestlé Upcycling Cacoa Pod Leftovers Into New Chocolate Without any Added Sugar

Nestlé has created a KitKat bar that combines two things we love here at The Spoon: chocolate and upcycling. Bloomberg reported yesterday that the Swiss candy maker has developed a way to use leftover material from cocoa plants to sweeten dark chocolate with no additional sugar.

How is this confectionary wizardry possible? Bloomberg writes, “The food company is using a patented technique to turn the white pulp that covers cocoa beans into a powder that naturally contains sugar.” Traditionally, this pulp has been thrown out, but by upcycling it, Nestlé can sweeten the bars without adding more sugar. This 70 percent dark chocolate KitKat bar will have “as much as 40 percent less sugar than most equivalent bars with added sugar,” according to Bloomberg, and will go on sale in Japan this fall.

An amusing sidenote to this story is that this discovery seems to be a bit of serendipity. Nestlé said it hadn’t set out to reduce the sugar, but was focused more on developing new ways to make chocolate using more of the cocoa pod. But we know that the company, facing consumers who are more health conscious and rising obesity rates, has been working on reducing sugars in its products. A little over a year ago Nestlé debuted a process of restructuring sugar that gave it more surface area and thus required using less of it while maintaining the same level of sweetness.

And Nestlé isn’t alone in looking to satisfy our global sweet tooth without sacrificing flavor. Israeli startup DouxMatok raised $22 million last month for its technology that uses silica to help sugar diffuse more efficiently in our mouths, so less is required. And in May, Singapore-based Nutrition Innovation raised $5 million for its Nucane, which is a lower glycemic sugar made via a different type of processing at sugar mills.

Nestlé said its new process could expand beyond dark chocolate and into milk and white chocolate as well. Even sweeter than the reduction in sugar is the reduction in food waste. Hopefully other companies will have cravings to follow suit.

DouxMatok Raises a Sweet $22M for its Sugar Reduction Technology

Israeli startup DouxMatok announced yesterday that it has raised a $22 million Series B round of funding for its sugar reduction system. The round was led by BlueRed Partners, with strategic investments from Südzuker AG, Royal DSM and Singha Ventures. This brings the total amount raised by DouxMatok to $30.2 million.

Sugar has come under more intense scrutiny over the past few years because of the high amount we’re eating and its deleterious effects on our bodies. Rather than creating some sugar substitute, DouxMatok aims to make the sugar we already consume more efficient. As we wrote when covering the company last year:

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.

According to the press announcement, DuoxMatok will use the new funding to scale up production and sales of its solution as it commercializes in Europe and North America. The company says it will soon complete manufacturing of its sugar in Europe, done in partnership with investor Südzucker AG. DouxMatok also says it’s in discussions with a number of food companies to reformulate their products. DouxMatok expects commercial availability of its sugar by the end of this year.

DouxMatok is not the only company looking to make sugar a little sweeter for the health conscious. Nutrition Innovation uses near-infrared technology and a different refinement process to make NuCane, which retains sugar’s minerals and has a lower glycemic index. Candy company Nestlé has experimented with its sweets by changing the structure of sugar through the addition of microscopic holes so less can be used.

As a big fan of confectionery treats, seeing all this innovation in sugar is definitely pretty sweet.

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.

IBM to Use IoT, Watson and Data to Boost Sugar Cane Production in Thailand

If you’re around my age, when you think of IBM, an image of big mainframe computers with giant rotating tape loops come to mind (I’m old). But for you young’uns, you’d be forgiven if the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about IBM is food.

Today, Big Blue announced a two-year research collaboration with the Thailand government’s National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) that will use IBM’s Internet of Things (Iot), artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics capabilities to help improve sugarcane yields in Thailand. (Thailand is the world’s second largest exporter of sugar.) The pilot will run on three sugar cane farms covering 1 million square meters run by Mitr Phol, Asia’s largest sugar producer.

IBM’s Agronomic Insights Assistant will bring together elements of IBM Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture, the IBM Pairs Geoscope and The Weather Company, which IBM purchased in 2015. The program will gather data from the fields (soil moisture, crop health, etc.) using a combination of IoT sensors and satellite imagery, which will be augmented with local data from the NSTDA and years of weather data from The Weather Company to better predict potential environmental issues like rainfall.

The IBM platform will then take all this data and run it through Watson to create a software and mobile dashboard to help Mitr Phol better assess and manage risks like pests, diseases, irrigation and pesticide/fertilizer application, with the goal of optimizing productivity and increasing crop yield.

The Agronomic Insights Assistant will start its pilot in the middle of this year, and because IBM is working with NSTDA, a government agency, the insights gained may be shared with other farmers in the region so they can apply the same tactics.

As noted earlier, IBM is a name that keeps popping up in the food tech space for us here at The Spoon. In September of last year the company created the Agropad, a cheap, paper sensor that could be used to measure acidity and chemical levels in soil. And earlier this year, Big Blue partnered with McCormick to apply its AI tech to developing new spices.

Right now, the Agronomic Insights Assistant is in the research phase, so things like pricing and availability weren’t discussed. IBM is facing a lot of competition in the data-driven-insights-for-agtech space. Arable and Teralytic both make field sensors to provide data on soil conditions, Taranis uses aerial imaging including from satellites to help farmers spot diseases early, and Hi Fidelity Genetics uses sensors, data and AI for improved crop breeding.

The advantage IBM has, of course, is that it’s IBM. It has existing sales channels, Watson is perhaps the premiere AI brand, and it can combine sensors, data, weather prediction and AI under one roof. And, of course, a younger generation of farmers unfamiliar with IBM’s roots may not have the preconceived notion of IBM’s mainframe roots.

Better Juice Uses Microorganisms to Reduce Sugar in OJ (and Beyond)

On the weekends if I go out to brunch, I like to treat myself to a tall glass of orange juice along with my pancakes and eggs. Which seems like a healthy choice: OJ, after all, is fruit — it’s got to be good for me, right?

Apparently, not so much. According to a study in the journal Nutrition (via NPR), fruit juice has a fructose concentration of about 45.5 grams per liter — which is only a smidgen less than soda, which averages at 50 grams per liter. Just one cup of OJ has 21 grams of sugar, which is almost half of the FDA’s recommended daily sugar limit.

But you don’t necessarily have to ditch your OJ just yet. A company called Better Juice is developing a way to cut down on the amount of simple sugars in fruit juice, honey, agave, and more. Founded in 2017, the Israeli startup has created a column-shaped piece of hardware which contains mobilized non-GMO microorganisms.

The column is adjustable and electric powered. After the juice is squeezed workers pour it into the column, which uses pumps, heat exchangers, and cooling to pass the liquid through the micro-organisms and out the other side. As it goes through, the microorganisms convert the fructose, glucose, and sucrose (basically, all the molecules that make food taste sweet) in the juice into fibers that will, um, pass, instead of absorbing into your body.

“We’re not actually removing the sugar,” explained Better Juice CEO Eran Blachinsky over the phone. “We’re leaving it in the juice, just in a non-digestible form.” Blachinsky wouldn’t disclose what kind of microorganisms they used (algae, yeast, etc.) but told me that they were food grade. The entire process takes about one hour from start to finish.

Jenn Marston wrote about Better Juice earlier this year, stating that its low-sugar, high-fiber product “basically solves the two biggest gripes about fruit juice out there right now.”

Of course, reducing the digestible sugar content also means the juice will taste less sweet, so the company has to strike a balance between health and flavor. “We are able to reduce 87 percent of the sugars,” said Blachinsky. “But most people enjoy a 30 percent reduction.” According to him, that percentage maintains the sweet taste while still allowing the beverage company to label their product as “reduced sugar,” targeting health-conscious consumers.

Better Juice currently has six employees and has received approximately $500,000 from Israeli food tech incubator The Kitchen Hub. The company has just completed its prototype and will be piloting it abroad with three beverage companies: one in Israel and two “abroad.”

Each liter of Better Juice’s micro-organism-filled column can treat 1,000 liters of juice. Blachinksy didn’t disclose exact pricing details, noting that the number depends on the quantity in production, but said that 1 cubic meter of column would cost between $100,000 and $200,000 total. While the hardware will last indefinitely, the company has to replace the micro-organisms ever 2 to 3 months.

Reduced sugar beverages are growing in popularity — soda sales are down, while low-sugar or sugar-free ready-to-drink (RTD) products are on the rise. With its B2B technology that allows any juice (or honey, or ice cream, etc.) company to reduce the amount of sugar in their product, without sacrificing taste, Better Juice could help a large range of companies break into the burgeoning healthy drink market.

The only issue I could see is adoption difficulties on the manufacturing side. Blachinksy asserted that Better Juice’s column is easy to install and wouldn’t require specially trained or skilled employees, but it’s easy to be optimistic before the real-world test of a pilot program. If the column is indeed as easy to plug into manufacturing practices as Blachinsky hopes, it could be a pretty sweet (sorry) deal for all involved.

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.

Hole-y Sweet Tooth! Nestlé Restructures Sugar to Use Less of it

“Sugar monster” is what we call my son after he’s had too much candy or cake at a birthday party and is all wound up. Yes, I know sugar doesn’t actually make kids hyper, but the term is a way of warning him off overindulging his sweet tooth.

“Eat any more and you’ll turn into a sugar monster,” we’ll say, totally sounding like parents.

But a new technology from Nestlé could automatically give him less sugar when he’s enjoying treats. The company introduced the Milkybar Wowsome this week, which has 30 percent less sugar than comparable bars. Don’t panic, candy lovers! The Wowsome, Nestlé promises, will still taste just as good as the classic Milkybars.

To achieve this wizardry, Nestlé scientists actually restructure the sugar when making the new Wowsomes. Genius Kitchen has a great explainer, likening it to cotton candy:

“Sugar, powdered milk and water are sprayed into hot air, which causes the particles to dry out and stabilize while filled with microscopic holes. This sugar structure causes the sugar to dissolve more quickly upon contact with liquid (in this case, on your tongue). The sugar tastes just as sweet, but since it’s porous, there’s less of it.”

SWEET!

Nestlé said that it will expand the use of this technique to more children’s chocolate brands.

This move is part of a larger global trend of companies looking to reduce the sugar they serve, as consumers become more conscious of what they put in their bodies and lawmakers flex legal muscles to reduce sugar consumption. In the U.S. Pepsi is fighting the soda sales slump with its Drinkfinity line of flavored water. Down under in Australia, Nutrition Innovation has developed Nucane, a “healthier” sugar made by altering the refining process. And Bayn Europe created SugarReduced, an online community and platform that provides tools to help food and beverage producers reduce and replace sugar in their products.

Sadly, Europe is where you need to be if you want to try out the new Milkybar Wowsome. The restructured sugar bar will hit store shelves in the U.K. and Ireland over the next few weeks.

Happily, however, I will definitely seek out and purchase this miracle of modern science while attending our Smart Kitchen Summit Europe in Dublin, Ireland June 11 – 12. Come say hi to me at the show and I’ll share one with you. (No sugar monsters allowed.)

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. 

Can Bayn’s Alt-Sugar Tech Beat Out Big Sugar?

Unless your home is a remote cave, you’ll know there are tons of questions around how to best reduce the amount of sugar we consume—especially when it comes to the added sugar that’s in everything from soup to salad dressings.

Bayn Europe is betting on technology to tackle the process of reducing sugar in our food, from the research and data collection stages to product development and marketing.

The Stockholm, Sweden-based company has worked since 2009 to develop new formulations that will lead to “sugar-reduction solutions” for the food and beverage industry. Now, as Food Navigator noted last week, Bayn has developed a cloud-based platform that addresses the various stages of that sugar reformulation process.

Called SugarReduced, which is also the company’s online community, the platform will be a “one-stop-shop” for product developers, marketers, and purchasers in the food and beverage industry. It has four major functions:

  • E-data is a bank of information on ingredients, legislation, and recipes.
  • E-planning software lets users calculate nutrition and sensory data before product development takes place.
  • E-development software allows for post-development analysis on things like taste and flavor.
  • Ordering is the platform’s e-commerce system that handles purchasing, logistics, and payment transactions.

Clear from all those steps is the fact that sugar reformulation involves much more than finding different ingredients to replace the taste, texture, and other properties of sugar. That may be one reason there’s much less movement than you might expect towards replacing a substance routinely called “the devil.”

“Today, the entire food chain is built upon added sugar,” Bayn CEO Lucy Dahlgren told Food Navigator. “[Reformulation] causes a major change from both a technical and commercial level. The food supply chain is broken and the market is disordered, which causes the difficulties to replace the added sugar.”

In other words, you can’t just start pushing “alt-sugar” and expect the entire food industry change to gracefully adapt. For one thing, according to Dahlgren, there’s no one single ingredient that can accurately replace sugar. Reformulation has to account for not just physical properties like taste and texture, but also things like cost efficiency.

An even more challenging problem is how to deal with Big Sugar—that is, the political powerhouse known as the sugar industry, which also happens to have a pretty shady track record that includes false advertising, paying people to stay silent, and outright lies. Despite that, it keeps an iron grip on the food and beverage industry, particularly in the U.S.

And while Bayn is aimed more at Europe than North America, its cloud platform has the potential to answer the question of sugar reduction on a worldwide scale.

Right now, Bayn is engaging with leading IT companies in Europe and China. A prototype of the platform has been developed and full launch is slated for 2020.

It’s not certain if we’ll see any iteration of this platform in the U.S.. However, this side of the Atlantic has numerous companies currently at work on sugar-reduction or sugar-replacement products. Natur Research Ingredients and Miraculex both work with the brazzein protein, which comes from the African oubli plant. The latter is also experimenting with the miraculin protein, which makes sour things taste sweet for around half an hour.

Other companies, such as Senomyx, take a cue from the pharmaceutical industry by testing ingredients to find new sweetening compounds.

Results from these efforts vary, and even were one of these companies to nail the chemical aspect, they would still face the challenge of cost, time to market, and all the other things Bayn’s platform will reportedly address.

Still, considering that sugar was once promoted as healthy by the government, and that not terribly long ago Big Sugar was paying off scientists, the growing noise around sugar reduction is heartening. Consumers continue the call for transparency. Platforms like Bayn help to answer that by providing a place to find reliable information about sugar. At the very least, they can keep the conversation going while we wait for Big Sugar to get properly knocked from its perch.