“There’s a push back to natural,” says Tim Bauer, director of business development, Robertet Flavors. “It’s resonating well across several segments of the food and beverage market because it has a healthy connotation. And now, for the first time, we have a high-intensity sweetener that’s natural and helps drive calories out.”
That sweetener is rebaudioside-A (reb-A), the natural, zero-calorie, stevia-based sweetener that garnered GRAS status from FDA in Dec. 2008. Since then, food manufacturers hoping to bask in the glow of natural’s healthy halo are formulating, or reformulating, products to include reb-A. The ingredient has proven so desirable that the market for reb-A is predicted to reach $100 million this year, according to Mintel, Chicago.
“But there are issues with the sweetener,” says Bauer. “There are challenges to incorporating it into food and beverage systems. It’s not a drop-in replacement, and there are flavor issues. Most notable is a bitter, licorice aftertaste, which is not desirable.”
Robertet Flavors has been busy developing tools to help food and beverage formulators overcome these off notes. The challenge is to mask the perceived bitter, licorice notes without impacting the finished product’s flavor profile.
“A lot of masking agents mask the bitter note and the flavor profile,” Bauer says. “It’s one thing to hunt and peck through flavors to find out what works, but we’ve taken a more-scientific approach and developed a sensory-evaluation system. In the flavor lab, we focused on overcoming perceived issues: astringency, sourness, bitterness. Once we had a masking flavor, we would test it in a system and present it to our trained sensory panel, using spider charts to track the success of the masking agent.”
It’s time-intensive, but the benefits have proven significant, as the company currently has several tools that mask reb-A’s objectionable end note, but don’t impact a beverage’s fruit flavor. The masking agents are natural, and appear as “natural flavor” on labels.
“The end result of creating a sensory panel around reb A is that we have a set of modulators that work, and as we make new gains, we’ll add more,” Bauer says. “One modulator that works in a juice system may not work in a dairy or spray-dried application, so we’ve developed several for each.”
This handful of successful modulators marks the end of the first phase of the project. “During phase two we’ll start looking through our flavor library to find flavors that work well in reb A systems,” Bauer notes. “We’ll match flavors with modulators in systems with reb A and/or other sweeteners.”
