Ingredients | Sweeteners
The evolution of sweeteners
Sweeteners are a diverse group of ingredients that not only enhance flavor, but also have functional roles in foods such as providing structure, improving mouthfeel, developing browning in baked goods and supporting yeast fermentations when bread rises.
The most common sweeteners are the nutritive carbohydrates: sugars, corn sweeteners and honey. The U.S. is the world’s largest consumer of natural sweeteners, consuming about 9 million tons of refined sugar, 12 million tons of corn sweeteners, and 170,000 tons of honey per year. Recent studies estimate that Americans consume about 150-170 pounds per year.
Over the past 40 years, non-nutritive, high-intensity sweeteners have appeared and developed a small, but growing market presence. Saccharin and cyclamate were first to market, followed by aspartame, acesulfame-K, Sucralose and Alitame. As regulatory hurdles were cleared and technical challenges were overcome, these sweeteners have become more popular as low calorie food ingredients. More will be developed, with higher sweetness intensity, to satisfy our craving for sweet products.
How Admix can help
Some sweeteners are difficult to dissolve with a conventional mixer. While sugar dissolves rapidly in hot coffee, it is much slower to dissolve in iced coffee or iced tea. The Rotosolver high shear mixer quickly disperse granular sugar to cut mixing time from 30 minutes to 10 minutes in cold water. This increases production capacity and reduces the number of tanks needed. In addition, liquid sugar and corn syrups are quickly and uniformly mixed with other liquids using an Admixer inline static mixer.
Aspartame has a low solubility in cold water, but is unstable in hot water or the acidified formulas sometimes used to increase solubility. Many beverage plants have increased their productivity using Admix Rotosolver or Rotosolver high shear mixers for aspartame and caffeine.
If you need to reduce energy consumption, save on capital equipment, and increase productivity, Admix can help. With decades of applications experience mixing difficult ingredients, we understand your processing goals. Our diverse product line includes sanitary high speed in-tank batch mixers, low-shear large capacity agitators, and powder induction systems that are custom-sized to fit your application.
Related links
Would liquefying granulated sugar in-house save you money over using liquid sweeteners? Check out this article to help evaluate using liquid sweetener versus processing granulated sweetener in-house