Best sweeteners (keto friendly)

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Coca-Cola to use stevia in Nestea and Sprite in France

Coca-Cola France has announced that it will use the stevia-based sweetener Truvia in Nestea and Sprite, with first consumer sales expected imminently. 

The formulation change is said to reduce calories and sugar content by 30%.

France approved stevia as an ingredient in 2009, ahead of the EU’s approval late in 2011. Coca-Cola France announced its use of a stevia-based sweetener in December 2009 with the reformulation of Fanta Still.

While Coca-Cola has used Truvia in over 30 products in seven countries over the past three years, its use has mostly been restricted to line extensions and to smaller brands. This announcement marks the company’s first use of the sweetener in its headline brands in a major market.

Coca-Cola could not confirm its plans for wider use of Truvia. The company also said that the introduction of Truvia-formulated products in France was not a reaction to the tax on sugared beverages there, claiming that the new products responded to consumer demand,

Truvia was jointly developed by Coca-Cola and Cargill, with approval being given by the FDA in 2008.

Truvia Could Upend the Sweeteners Market

Coca-Cola and Cargill (a private agribusiness company, the largest private corporation in the US, has operations in about 70 countries) have come up with something the food industry has been seeking for years: A "natural" zero-calorie sweetener.

In 2008, the companies introduced "Truvia," a product made from the South American plant stevia, which has been used for decades in Paraguay and Brazil, as well as in East Asia.

The companies have been developing the product for more than a decade. The main stumbling block has been the Food and Drug Administration, which has banned its use as a food ingredient due to health concerns. (But in another example of the United States' insane food-regulation framework, the FDA had earlier OK'd stevia as a "dietary supplement" that could be sold as long as it wasn't marketed as an actual food or as a sweetener.)

In May, the companies issued a set of studies showing that stevia is safe. Even the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an organization that often seems biased toward banning anything even remotely questionable, and which in the past has looked askance at stevia, has said the studies seem to put the product in the clear.

So Truvia is now going on sale as a tabletop sweetener. The big prize for Coke and Cargill, though, is still ahead, whenever Truvia makes its way into processed food products such as soft drinks and breakfast cereals. Coke has exclusive rights to its use in soft drinks, and Cargill will market it to food processors. Those will start rolling out over the next year.

None of this is good news for the companies that make what are for now the top-selling artificial sweeteners, all of which have some kind of problem associated with them.

Splenda, made by Tate & Lyle, now enjoys nearly two-thirds of the market for non-sugar sweeteners. Splenda is the brand name of sucralose, a laboratory-concocted chemical. Though it has passed muster with most regulatory agencies, several health concerns have been raised about the product. And for marketing purposes, there's nothing "natural" about it -- although the company did try to get away with saying it was "made from sugar" until its competitors sued.

Aspartame is sold chiefly under two brand names -- Equal, owned by Merisant, and NutraSweet, owned by the private-equity shop J.W. Childs. Though also approved by regulatory bodies, mounting health concerns -- including cancer scares -- are what allowed Splenda to trounce aspartame in the marketplace.

Other potential losers include the small companies that have been marketing stevia as a "dietary supplement," which is all the FDA would allow. There are a bunch of these, but perhaps the most interesting is Zevia, a Seattle company that sells an eponymous soft drink that can't be called a soft drink. Zevia, according to its label, is "a carbonated stevia supplement" that is a "natural alternative to diet soda." 

Stevia

The discovery and development of high-intensity sweeteners, used simply for their non-nutritive sweetening properties, signified a major turning point in the food and beverages industry. They enabled food technologists to develop products which satisfied our sweet cravings without adding to our caloric intake. With rising levels of obesity and diabetes dominating headlines worldwide, there has never before been so much emphasis on reducing our caloric intake as well as consuming healthier foods and beverages.

However as the use of high-intensity sweeteners has become more widespread so too has the rising number of voices expressing concerns over the toxicity of some of these products, fears that were first recognized at a national level when Japan decided to ban certain artificial sweeteners in the late 1960s. Since then the growing worldwide emphasis on health and a widening demand for natural ingredients has led the food and beverage industry to look much more closely at alternative sweetening ingredients.

One herb of South American origin quickly caught the attention of the wider food and beverages industry boasting natural, non-caloric, sweetening properties: stevia.

Originating from Paraguay, Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni, commonly known simply as stevia, is one of the 240 species of herbs and shrubs which comprise the Stevia genus of the sunflower family (Asteraceae). Also known as sweetleaf and sugarleaf, stevia leaf offers sweetness without adding any calories.

The green powder derived from crude stevia leaves can be 15 to 30 times sweeter than sugar, while stevia extracts, which can come in both white crystalline powder and liquid format, offer a sweetening power hundreds of times greater than sugar. The sweetening properties are provided by the content of a dozen or so different steviol glycosides, which are largely odorless and freely soluble in water and ethanol. Also, stevia is heat stable at 95°C, photo stable and boasts a long shelf-life. Improvements in refining processes have helped to improve the overall taste profile and reduce the bitterness, enabling its use in a wide range of foods from beverages and baked goods to confectionary and preserves. Nevertheless, while its versatility as an ingredient makes it an attractive choice, it is stevia’s all-natural credentials which make it stand out from the crowd.

While it has been used in Paraguay for centuries, and extensively as a sweetener in general food use in the Far East for decades, particularly Japan, in the last four years stevia has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity on the global stage, thanks largely to the persistent efforts by key producers to push legislators worldwide to give the green light to this new zero-calorie sweetener.

Limited for many years by regulatory constraints, the breakthrough came in June 2008 when Joint WHO/FAO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) stated that steviol glycosides are safe for use in foods and beverages. Since then stevia’s profile on the global food and drinks stage has rocketed. The domino-effect approval by legislators across the world opened the door to new formulations and reformulations of foods and beverages with zero- or reduced-calorie content and its status as a global ingredient was secured with its incorporation into leading soft drinks brands including PepsiCo’s SoBe Lifewater Zero and Trop 50 calorie-reduced fruit juice, and Coca-Cola’s Glaceau Vitaminwater Zero and Sprite Green. As a table-top sweetener, it has gained popularity under brands names such as Truvia, developed jointly by Cargill and Coca-Cola, and PureVia, developed through the combined efforts of Whole Earth Sweetener Company, PepsiCo and PureCircle.

However stevia is still only at the start of its global journey. Although it has been given full approval in a number of regions, including the Far East, US, Asia Pacific and South America, crucially it has still to receive the green light from European authorities. Once approval has been secured in Europe, other regulating authorities in Africa and the Middle East are likely to follow suit, with full global approval expected by the end of 2012. The level of popular acceptance of stevia in North and South America and Asia suggests that the global potential for this all-natural sweetener is significant.

A new study by leading food and drink consultancy Zenith International estimates that worldwide sales of stevia reached 3,500 metric tonnes in 2010, a 27% increase on 2009, taking its overall market value to US$285 million. Zenith forecasts that the global market for stevia will reach 11,000 metric tonnes by 2014, equivalent to US$825 million by value.