Mintel breaks down sweetener use in food and drink

23-Aug-2010 - Last updated on 24-Aug-2010 at 10:34 GMT

With the UK’s Food Standards Agency preparing to routinely analyse food products for their sweetener content, FoodNavigator.com takes a look at the uptake of different sweeteners over the past five years.

According to data provided by the market researcher Mintel, sweetener use has been slowly but steadily increasing since 2004 in the key European markets of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK.

Data provided to FoodNavigator.com gives a post-market analysis of the use of a range of different products, including aspartame, acesulfame potassium, isomalt, saccharin, lacitol and erythritol.

Sweetener types

There are two main categories of sweeteners used in foods and beverages: bulk sweeteners and polyols; and high intensity sweeteners.

Bulk sweeteners, including sugars, are also known as nutritive sweeteners, have a technical role in the food as well as sweetening it. They contribute to the bulk, the texture and the viscosity of foods.

High intensity sweeteners, also called non-nutritive, do not have a technical role in addition to their sweetening capacity. This means that if any of the attributes normally provided by sugars is required, the chosen high intensity sweetener will need to be blended with a bulk sweetener or some other bulking agent. High intensity sweeteners tend to be more expensive than bulk, but are used in a far smaller quantities.

Ace-K and aspartame

Out of the sweeteners examined for this article, the high-intensity sweeteners acesulfame potassium (Ace-K) and aspartame were by far the most popular in new food and drink launches between 2004 and 2010.

In just over six years (2004 to date), Ace-K was used in 2225 new products in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK as recorded by Mintel’s global new products database (GNPD). On the whole, usage increased slowly but steadily from 285 new products in 2004 to 418 last year. In 2010 to date there have been 257 products launched that list acesulfame potassium as an ingredient.

Aspartame was used in 1769 products during the period tracked, appearing in 302 products in 2004 and 326 in 2009.

The other high-intensity sweetener analysed was saccharin. Mintel’s GNPD recorded 167 new products made with this ingredient since 2004 in the key European markets tracked. Again, numbers gradually increased from 15 in 2004 to 31 last year. In 2010 to date, there have been 20 new products containing saccharin.

The bulk sweeteners we looked at were isomalt, lacitol and erythritol.

Out of these, isomalt appeared in the most new products, being listed on the ingredient lists of 391 products in the period tracked.

Lacitol was used in 48 products, while erythritol was listed in 23 products.

Sweetener use and testing

Data from Euromonitor International put world use of high intensity sweeteners at 77183.4 tonnes in 2008 – of which the most popular five, saccharin, aspartame, acesulfame K, sucralose and cyclamate – make up the lion’s share.

In that year, Euromonitor found that 70336474.9 tonnes of sugars and bulk sweeteners were used. The top non-sugar bulk sweeteners made up 700579 tonnes.

In the UK, the Food Standards agency last week indicated that it plans to test food products for their sweetener content, to ensure that the levels used are safe.

The agency last week called for research proposals for a fully validated method to detect and measure the presence of sweeteners in food, including saccharin, aspartame, acesulfame K, NHDC, sucralose, cyclamic acid, neotame and stevia extracts. Click here for more information.