Cargill developed a crème cake with 50% sugar and 50% oil reduction that yielded a product with a 26% calorie reduction.

Consumers have been creating healthier cakes for their families for years using apple sauce and other lower fat shortcuts. A few years ago, the American Cancer Society joined forces with The Culinary Institute of America to reinvent the birthday cake as a more healthful treat “because healthy living is key to creating a world with less cancer and more birthdays.”¹ The healthier cake trend has now moved to retail shelves and food manufacturers because of increased consumer demand.

Cargill’s technical teams have been working on healthier but tasty cake formulas for food manufacturers. The trick is to replace the fat with ingredients that don’t compromise on taste and texture. It’s easy to do a straight swap of ingredients to make a product healthier. It’s much more difficult to replace the fat with a cost neutral system that maintains the cake sensory experience.

Functional systems can include multiple ingredients and processes. Swapping a percent of oil with apple sauce for home cooking is a great example of replacing fat with a functional system. Apple sauce isn’t a single ingredient. Apple sauce in a cake formula is a system that includes additional ingredients and processing.

CitriTex® GSG 71 is a fat replacement system designed to replace oils in bakery sweet goods. CitriTex® blends are a blend of citrus pulp fiber and other functional components that provide a solution for solids and liquid replacement technology and can serve as a thickening agent for food. In muffin and cake applications, tests showed equal batter viscosity, height and cell structure compared to the control. CitriTex® GSG 71 provided slightly higher moisture, equal spring and improved shelf life when compared to the control over 6 days.

CitriTex® GSG 71 stabilizer blend replaces up to 50 percent of the oil in sweet bakery products and offers:

• Reduced fat
• Reduced calorie
• Enhanced quality during shelf life
• Texture improvement versus full fat version/improved sensory
• Can be cost neutral to oil
• Ease of use (can be added anytime during the mixing process, doesn’t need to be pre-hydrated)

The blend meets a key consumer desire for indulgent products with better-for-you characteristics as well as the manufacturer’s desire for cost optimization as it costs less than the oil it's replacing. This solves two of our customers' biggest challenges when it comes to reduced fat.

Not only do the baked sweets made with CitriTex® have an eating quality and texture indistinguishable from the full-calorie versions, they also have superior moisture, equal spring and a longer shelf life. CitriTex® cracked the conundrum of the cardboard-like texture of low-fat products by providing lubrication for the gluten in baked goods.

CitriTex® blends provide a clean label solution for food and beverage replacement technology. There are no clean label standards in place but the blend is made with ingredients like citrus pulp fiber that allows consumers to make informed decisions regarding their food’s contents.

We've always eaten baked goods because of their taste, not their nutritional content. Today's consumers are no longer content with that: they're demanding great taste with fewer calories and less total and saturated fat, too. Now Cargill can give them that.

¹http://pressroom.cancer.org/index.php?s=43&item=169