Food Business News - August 28, 2012 - 31

New Product Innovations

Calorie Reduction

Companies are looking to reduce sugar in cereals and snacks to make formulations healthier

educing the amount of sugar in children’s cereals and snack products is a tricky process, especially when trying to replace the sweetness and functionality sugar provides. “The drive is on to try to help cut sugars out in some places where they can be to make it a little bit less mainstream in everything (children) grab,” said Linda Wilson, business development manager for bars at Glanbia Nutritionals, Monroe, Wis. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, added sugars in processed and prepared foods represents about 16% of children’s total caloric intake. But discretionary calories should only represent between 5% and

15% of total daily caloric intake, according to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010. As a result, Kelly Belknap, application scientist with Grain Processing Corp., Muscatine, Iowa, said customers are under pressure to meet certain requirements, like those set out by the National School Lunch Program. These customers want help with sugar reduction, and many are working with school nutrition programs.

Technical challenges and solutions
Ms. Wilson said the functional reason cereals and bars are typically high in sugar is because the sugar acts as a binding agent and helps the product hold together during its shelf life. “It’s very hard to get good binding capabilities once you start taking sugars out,” Ms. Wilson said. “There are some other means that can be used, but they just don’t hold together as well as your typical syruptype systems do.” Glanbia, which was challenged by one of the big three

cereal manufacturers to develop a solution for binding, created OptiSol 2000. In many applications, OptiSol 2000 may help reduce sugar 25% without having to add anything to replace the sweetness, Ms. Wilson said. The technology duplicates the binding functionality of a normal syrup system. A number of cereals and granola bars featuring the OptiSol 2000 binding technology are set to be introduced later this year, she said.Glanbia would like to expand its efforts to help reduce sugar in fruit snacks and confections, and the company is beginning to work on such projects. Wade Schmelzer, principal food scientist of health and nutrition at Cargill, Minneapolis, said several technical challenges with sugar reduction in cereal include the fact sugar contributes to appearance with the frosted look. Sugar also contributes to moisture migration for the milk and helps keep cereal crisp longer, and achieving a good sweet impact with less sugar is difﬁcult.

He said whitening agents may be used to help with the frosted appearance. Mr. Schmelzer and Jane Friedrich, principal scientist with snacks and cereals at Cargill, emphasized the need to add bulk back into snacks and cereals once the sugar has been removed. Inulin is one ingredient that may be used, but it also provides additional ﬁber, and, depending on the needs of the consumer, not every manufacturer wants the added ﬁber. When looking to reduce sugar in formulations, Mr. Schmelzer said manufacturers must consider their ultimate goal. “Is their ultimate goal to stay as sweet as they currently are, or are they progressively going to make some small step-wise changes in reducing sweetness? Because that’s going to impact the tools they are going to have to think about using,” Mr. Schmelzer said.

Stevia expanding to foods
Ms. Belknap said most companies are looking to highintensity sweeteners to help

August 28, 2012

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