Tate & Lyle develops new beverage sugar reduction concepts

Tate & Lyle, a leading global provider of innovative food ingredients and solutions, has launched new beverage prototypes as part of its OPTIMIZE™ offer. Tate & Lyle’s global optimisation service, OPTIMIZE™, helps food manufacturers to formulate food and drinks recipes which cost less but retain their original taste.

Pomegranate-grape juice drink One of the new additions to the offer is a pomegranate-grape juice drink. With this newly reformulated product, Tate & Lyle has reduced the sugar content by up to 45%, using a blend of sweeteners to retain the drink’s original taste and sweetness profile. Importantly the prototype delivers significant sweetener cost savings, while also reducing calories by 45%. This combination gives manufacturers the opportunity to replace traditional full-sugar drinks with a lower cost, lower in calorie alternative.

Tate & Lyle has a complete portfolio of OPTIMIZE™ beverage concepts which includes juice drinks and carbonated soft drinks with different flavours, as well as tea flavoured drinks and flavoured waters. These are examples of the potential benefits of recipe reformulation for both food manufacturers and their customers. With commodity prices soaring, these sugar reduction concepts offer manufacturers a way to cut costs, while meeting consumer demand for products with improved nutritional profiles.

Paul Cornillon, Vice President, Global Applications, Tate & Lyle Specialty Food Ingredients, explains: “Our goal is to help our customers face the challenges the markets throw at them. With commodity prices soaring and consumers becoming increasingly cost and health conscious, manufacturers are finding it more challenging than ever before to maintain profitability. The pressure on margins is such that manufacturers need to step up their reformulation efforts – this new product shows what can be achieved.”

OPTIMIZE™ beverage concepts are either formulated with SPLENDA® Sucralose or with a combination of SPLENDA® Sucralose and FRUCTOPURETM Fructose. Reformulations with these ingredients have already proven successful in the marketplace: globally, between 2007 and 2010, new launches of beverage products containing sucralose increased by 21%, while new launches of beverages containing sucralose and fructose rose by 30% (source: Mintel GNPD).