Mostly Natural Artificial Sweetener

Move over stevia, sugar and even HFCS; there’s a new natural sweetener in town—sucralose. That’s what tabletop sweetener company Heartland Sweetener is trying to tell us—sort of.

News stories have surfaced that describe the company’s fight to call its Ideal brand xylitol and sucralose sweetener as “natural” or “more than 99% natural.” The company plans to appeal a non-binding ruling from the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus to the National Advertising Review Board that asks the company to stop these "natural" advertising claims.

The rationale for the natural claims according to one report is “the allegation that 80% of the sweetness in the Ideal product comes from artificial sources is oversimplified, and that the natural sweetener xylitol provides all of the initial sweetness. Sucralose has a delayed effect and only comes into play on the palette later.”

Super. (Read that in a tone dripping with sarcasm.) Perhaps the rest of the industry can take that position. An ice cream manufacturer can use a small amount of petrochemical-derived vanillin as a flavor enhancer in an orange crème product and call the product natural. Or a natural dog-food manufacture can add a smidgen of ethoxyquin to its tocopherol- and rosemary-based antioxidant blend. Hey, it’s mostly natural, isn’t it?

The term natural is fuzzy enough as it is. There’s no reason to make it totally meaningless by using it to describe a sweetener product that relies on an artificial sweetener for any proportion of its sweetness.

   -Lynn A. Kuntz