The State of Innovation in Sugar Reduction: 2018 Edition

Reducing and substituting for sucrose has been the heartache of food and beverage companies for decades. There are many innovations trying to replicate what sugar does, but they’re near misses at best and seriously poor-tasting at worst. To help identify which sugar reduction technologies are best positioned to replace or reduce sucrose, we evaluated 20 different alternative sweeteners using a proprietary scoring framework across six distinct parameters. Novel approaches like physical modifications (e.g., silica-sugar crystals) certainly hold promise, and lagging solutions like sweet proteins can essentially be ignored. Our analysis reaffirms that there is no clear front-runner solution; clients will need to choose sugar reduction technologies thoughtfully, potentially in combination, to achieve their strategic goals