Company: Icon Foods

Website: iconfoods.com

Ingredient Snapshot: Reducing sugar, maintaining sweetness and obtaining clean-label status have long comprised the “holy grail” for food and beverage technologists striving to create low-sugar products for demanding consumers. Now they have a single-source product to do just that: Icon Foods’ new sweetener, IconiSweet.

The innovative sweetener takes four separate elements that often are used to replace natural sugar—allulose, erythritol, stevia and monk fruit—and blends them together, creating a single product that offers each of their advantages while also eliminating individual drawbacks. The result is a product that tastes like sugar, has no off notes, offers browning capability and also has a durable shelf life.

“Each sweetener has its own quirks, and developers have spent countless hours tinkering with combinations to offset different flavor notes alone, for example,” says Thom King, president and CEO of Icon Foods. “Now you have a product that combines each of them, bringing forth their attributes at optimum levels to create an entirely new sweetener.”

In addition to the cost savings realized by a single-source sweetener, IconiSweet delivers in other ways:

• Off notes from stevia or monk fruit are mitigated by erythritol and allulose.
• Erythritol drives down freezing depression.
• Allulose increases frozen-dessert overrun and also offsets — completely — any cooling effect that erythritol might add to candy.
• Erythritol lowers water activity, extending the shelf life of baked goods, and also participates in the Maillard reaction, giving breads and cookies a golden hue.

“This is probably the cleanest, most versatile sweetening system I have ever worked with,” King says. “It brings all these ingredients together in perfect proportion, reducing time on the bench as well as number of attempts, not to mention providing both clean flavor and a clean-label opportunity.”

For more information, contact sales@iconfoods.com, call (310) 455-9876 or visit http://iconfoods.com/all-products/iconisweet-clean-label-sweetening-system/. To download a whitepaper, visit: http://iconfoods.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/IconiSweet_White_Paper.pdf.