With consumers increasingly demanding products that offer ‘healthy indulgence,’ sugar reduction in today’s beverages is a common threefold challenge of achieving deep cuts in sugar content, replicating sugar’s delicious taste, plus all the while maintaining a clean ‘natural’ product label. Today marks a new horizon for natural beverage sweeteners as HOWTIAN proudly introduces SoPure™ Andromeda. Andromeda, part of HOWTIAN’s industry-leading SoPure™ family of stevia products, is a range of proprietary stevia blends uniquely designed and optimised for a wide range of beverage applications.
Said Tom Fuzer, VP of market strategy: “As a natural sweetening solution that offers superior taste performance and significant cost savings over sugar, HOWTIAN’s SoPure Andromeda unlocks new opportunities in sugar reduction for the beverage industry.”
Following an extensive study at HOWTIAN’s Shanghai Application Technology & Innovation Centre, Andromeda blends have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in enhancing a variety of beverages, far surpassing the performance of conventional Reb A stevia extracts. The unique blends of steviol glycosides have been meticulously formulated to deliver superior overall taste at a cost-effective price, even in beverage applications looking to achieve high levels of sugar reduction and replacement.
Industry efforts to increase the levels and accelerate the pace of sugar reduction in beverages hardly come as a surprise. A National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that sugar-sweetened beverages are the #1 source of excess sugar consumption globally.
Added Fuzer: “This puts the beverage category squarely as a target for sugar reduction initiatives and regulatory actions like sugar taxes. In addition, rapidly rising sugar prices paired with declining global production of sugar have pressured beverage manufacturers to seek more cost-effective sweetening solutions.”
In spite of this, there remain significant hurdles for many beverage companies when it comes to reformulating and sweetening their products with alternatives. Sugar provides a rich, unadulterated sweet taste, whereas sugar substitutes can sometimes produce a lingering, bitter aftertaste at higher concentrations. Beyond sweetness, other taste components of the beverage can also be affected, as well as the body, the smoothness and the overall mouthfeel. Many sugar replacements can lead to an imbalance between sweetness and acidity, or in some cases sourness, in the product.
To help overcome these challenges, SoPure™ Andromeda products have been tailored to deliver a sweetening solution for beverages that exceeds the taste and sensory performance of conventional stevia and other sugar alternatives.
SoPure™ Andromeda products are fully natural stevia-based sweetener blends, ideal for formulating clean label beverage products. According to Innova Market Insights, consumers around the world perceive stevia as the ‘most natural’ sugar alternative by far, beating out alternatives including sucralose, aspartame, erythritol, allulose and more.
SoPure™ Andromeda addresses both crucial taste and cost concerns that beverage manufacturers face today. Andromeda provides up to 64% in cost savings on sweetener components compared to traditional sugar. This makes it not only a healthier choice but also an economically attractive one for beverage companies operating in an increasingly cost-conscious market. For more visit howtiangroup.com
