Challenges in sugar reduction

Challenges in sugar reduction

Sugar is a simple ingredient with so many functions that it is quite complex to actual reformulate a product if it’s high in sugar. Moreover as if we do a like for like consumer panel, consumer will start to notice sugar reduction if it’s over 16%, whereas fat can easily be reduced up to 50% without consumers noticing it. Most single ingredients that come into mind for reducing sugar can easily replace about 20-30% without loss of texture. However most products have less sweetness intensity and above all a different duration of perceived sweetness.

A second challenge can be the colouring of the product: monosaccharides colour different compared to disaccharides and at different temperatures as well. In several cases are polyols used as a bulk replacer: they will have lower sweetening intensities and in several cases higher temperatures for colouration. Fibers, such as oligofructose, soluble wheat or maize/ corn fibers tend not to colour at all, so products tend to end up being pale.

Thirdly we can argue that the moment that a sugar crystal is stable tends to be around 70°C, what we could call glass transition temperature. So when replacing sugar by an alternative that tends to be liquid or even still very solid we would see that products tend to be softer or in the other case harder than the reference.

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Below you can find a sumup of different properties of sugars (common mono- and disaccharides) and their alternatives:

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