00:07Nutrition Insights, according to IFT 2024 in Chicago.

00:11We're here at the Nutra X stand with Harvey Martins, who is the VP of Business Development.

00:16Welcome to you.

00:18So tell us about your company and what you've chosen to highlight today at the show.

00:22So my company is the sweetener house Nutre Food, and we concentrate on natural sweeteners.

00:30At this show, we're demonstrating our capability to help food and beverage manufacturers remove the sugar from their products and replace it with indulgent sweeteners but with less or no sugar.

00:47And what's the main challenges associated with that area of innovation?

00:51The primary issue that you run into when you remove sugar is to get the taste right.

00:58The sweetness profile is, we, we think of sugar as the gold standard for sweetness, and when you substitute another sweetener.

01:08Whether it's stevia or monk fruit or erythrool allulose, some of these other natural products, they tend not to behave exactly the same way as sugar does in terms of the sweet profile.

01:22So our biggest challenge is to provide a perfect match, a balanced combination to get the taste and the sweetness just right for consumers.

01:33What are the main end markets and application areas you're targeting?

01:37So we focus on the food and beverage areas.

01:42Beverage is a big item for us.

01:44Many of our customers are making alcoholic beverages, still beverages, carbonated soft drinks, and other beverages, fruit-based beverages.

01:55We're also significant in the Confection space where we make sugar free, we work with people who make sugar free chocolate and with candies, gummies.

02:10Now we are moving beyond that into bakery and at this show we're actually demonstrating some bakery products that are sweetened with sugar replacement and therefore less sugar.

02:22OK, and you mentioned sugar reduction is a big industry trend.

02:25What factors are driving this demand?

02:28So there's, there's a significant issue in the consumers now to get rid of sugar because sugar attributes to some of the, debilitating diseases like, obesity, even, diabetes are associated with high usage of, sugar, and also there's a weight, issue.

02:48People are looking to reduce their weight.

02:50And they're finding that by having sweet goods they tend to put on the extra pounds.

02:57OK, and looking forward over the next sort of 3 to 5 years.

03:01What's your main focus in terms of innovation R&D as a company?

03:05So, we, we've just launched at this show a new product that does blocking of sugar, and we see this is an area of great interest coming forward.

03:16Reducing the sugar or eliminating it from the formula is part of the solution.

03:21Yes, that's true.

03:22But also there are some products you can't take the sugar out, for example, a, a yogurt or some of the dairy products, some of the fruit beverages in bakery, there are starches which turn into sugar in the body.

03:39And so what we're now introducing is our brand new buy sugar which replaces sugar with a sugar that's reduced.

03:49But also has a sugar blocker included in it.

03:53The sugar blocker is called arabinose, and we see that that sugar blocking is going to be probably a big impact as the years going forward.

04:04And so we're studying arabinose and finding out how it works and using it in different applications.

04:11That's really interesting, Harvey.

04:11Thanks for your time.

04:12Enjoy the rest of the show.

04:13OK, thank you.