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.

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.

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