More sweetness with less sugar?

Oh tasty! Why is everything so tasty? The food industry has accustomed us to so many pleasures at all times and in all formats that, today 55% of Spaniards are overweight, 15% are prediabetic, and 4 out of 10 children already have overweight problems…

The delight of the palate has been perfected by creating increasingly addictive (and profitable) products.

In the 1980s the big culprit for the rising rates of cardiovascular disease was fat and the low-fat boom began. Poor us who grew up in this era, because fats were replaced by carbohydrates and sweeteners, leaving us always hungry and on a glucose and insulin roller coaster.

As we reach the year 2024, there is a new consensus: the culprit is sugar and refined carbohydrates that trigger a metabolic response giving glucose spikes and an insulin response that stores excess energy in the liver, muscle tissue and, of course, in fat tissue where it accumulates for times of shortage making it difficult to access.

Nowadays there are numerous efforts and innovations to reduce and replace sugar, for example with the use of sweet proteins, but today I want to talk about O’Taste. A micro-milling technology of sugar (and salt) emulsified with fats that gives the sensation of sweet (or salty) but with only a fraction of the sugar (or salt).

They reduce with a patented technology the size of the molecules from 500 microns to less than 5 microns and we perceive it so extremely sweet that the amount of sugar can be reduced by 80% without changing the taste at all.

To demonstrate its revolutionary technology and possible applications for the industry , O’Taste has launched Barely. Currently available in Israel and the US, it is a cocoa and hazelnut spread with 80% less sugar than the original, only 4g of sugar and 40g of fiber per 100g of product.

Barely has a very good rotation and seems to be the panacea for multiple applications in spreads, cookies, all kinds of sweets such as ice cream, pastries, chocolate, bars and more.

But not only that, they also apply the same technology to salt, although for the moment it is only applicable to wet and greasy formulations.

Omer Shoham - VP Marketing & Sales of OTaste with Malwine Steinbock Food Scouting

I had the opportunity to try it this year at SIAL and talk to Omer Shoham – VP Marketing & Sales who is confident that his technology is going to revolutionize the industry. I found it to be a very good ‘oh, tasty!’ product.

In 2025, we will be watching closely how this and other technologies evolve to improve the nutritional profile of foods.

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