With an increase in consumers looking for products with lower sugar contents and a need to be transparent with ingredients, finding the next generation of sweeteners can be a challenge.

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Designed to deliver a sugar-like experience with minimal metabolic load, these sweeteners fall into three categories: high-intensity natural extracts (eg. stevia and monk fruit); rare monosaccharides (eg. D-allulose); and bioengineered molecules created via fermentation or enzymatic conversion.

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Globally, the regulatory environment for these novel ingredients is in constant flux, requiring careful attention to regional differences and recent decisions from food safety authorities.

While their functional performance is generally very varied across product categories, ranging from sports drinks and carbonated soft drinks to frozen dessert products and fibre-containing baked foods, this calls for a precision strategy in formulating designs. While innovation is moving fast, formulating next-generation sweeteners poses a chain of function-based performance hurdles requiring unique strategies by product category.

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Over the next five years, advances in synthetic biology, enzymatic engineering and precision fermentation will enhance the scalability, cost-efficiency and functionality of sweetener solutions.

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