The food industry continues to strive toward food and beverage formulations with reduced-sugar and/or those that use natural sweeteners—both caloric and non-caloric. Global Food Forums’ 2021 Sweetener Systems Premium Webinar provides impartial, non-commercial consumer trends and technology information to assist food scientists and other product developers with these goals.
Formulating with Sweet Enhancing Ingredients
Thursday, November 4, 2021 11:00am CDT
11:00am – 11:05am
Welcome & Introduction
11:05am – 11:30am

Stephanie Mattucci, CFS
Associate Director, Food Science, Mintel
Consumers’ quest for healthier diets is putting more pressure on brands to address the sugar content in their products. Not only has the COVID-19 pandemic prompted people to pay greater attention to their health, but it has also changed the way consumers interact with sweetener ingredients at home. This creates new opportunities for better-for-you sweeteners to meet consumers’ wellness goals, both at home and in retail food and drink products. Learn more about today’s sweetener ingredients trends. Find out what consumers are looking for in sweeteners and how innovative ingredient solutions are rising to the challenge.
11:30am – 12:00pm

John C. Fry, Ph.D
Director, Connect Consulting
The seemingly ever-growing list of high-potency sweeteners (HPS) complicates formulation. Whether reducing or eliminating sugar from established products, or creating completely new ones, the alternative sweetener world can be bewildering. This presentation concentrates on practicality: sweetener selection, deciding how much to use, assessing prototypes fairly, and dealing with sweetener defects. The approaches are applicable to all HPS, from the world’s oldest HPS, saccharin, to the latest sweetening proteins in development.
12:00pm – 12:30pm

Melanie Goulson, MSc
President, Merlin Development
Stevia, monk fruit and older high potency sweeteners provide desired sweetness to products. However, many reduced-sugar foods would never make it into the marketplace without the additional presence of bulking ingredients. From tried-and-true favorites like isomalt to newer entrants like allulose, this presentation provides examples and technical tips of how these “partners to high intensity sweeteners” can help mitigate texture and flavor issues.
12:30pm – 01:00pm

Kristen Sparkman, M.S.
Culinologist, CuliNex, LLC
While developing products with whole fruit sweeteners can increase the health halo of a product and make an ingredient statement more consumer-friendly, there are some challenges. Common formulating challenges with whole fruit sweeteners include determining how non-sugar components of fruit can impact products and determining which format is favorable for the desired final products. In this presentation, we will be covering ways to use various forms of apples, berries, dates, raisins, and prunes, providing examples of ways to formulate with each. These examples come from previous research and development from the CuliNex Development team.