Taking a holistic approach to sugar reduction in chocolate
There is a high awareness of the drive to reduce sugar in food and drink. In the UK, Public Health England is challenging businesses to cut sugar in their products by 20% by 2020, alongside reducing calorie content overall too.
This results in a real challenge to find sugar reduction solutions – but most importantly, particularly in chocolate, without compromising on taste. There are a number of possible routes and solutions to sugar reduction in chocolate:
- Reformulation: no addition of a new ingredient
- Carbohydrate-based solution
- Protein-based solution
- Addition of dietary fibers
- Mineral solution
Sugar reduction – a simple matter?
All of the possible routes to sugar reduction mentioned have drawbacks, whether that is in terms of the amount of sugar reduction that can be achieved, the nutritional impact, the impact on taste, on cost, or on labelling.
With no single ‘drop in’ solution that suits all applications, it becomes evident that it is necessary to combine solutions. Our goal is a holistic approach, identifying key parameters to provide the sugar reduced chocolate that best suits our customers’ needs.
Multi-component sugar reduction
If we wanted to reduce sugar by 30% in a multi-component product such as a biscuit covered with chocolate, a straightforward approach would be to reduce sugar by 30% in the chocolate and by 30% in the biscuit, but would this result in the best possible tasting biscuit?
A holistic approach is often the best way to deliver the required sugar reduction while maintaining optimum flavour and texture. This would mean reducing sugar for each component separately, for example reducing sugar by less in the biscuit and by more in the chocolate.
Particularly in multi-component products, sugar-reduction is a complex and varied task, requiring a combination of approaches and techniques. This is very much about taste, and what the consumer thinks of the end product.
The importance of consumer research
Consumer research and taste panels play a key role. Cargill uses what is known as Just About Right (JAR) analysis to provide an insight into what sweetness level consumers expect a product to have. This helps us to ensure that when we undertake sugar reduction requests from customers in relation to their products, the end result will be accepted by the consumer.
Using the chocolate topped biscuit example, it was found that participants considered the product in which most of the sugar is reduced in the chocolate, and therefore less in the biscuit, fitted their sweetness expectations just as well as the standard product used as the reference.
The product in which most of the sugar was reduced in the biscuit fitted the sweetness expectations of the consumer panel less, with the lowest score given to the biscuit in which 30% of the sugar was reduced equally in both components.
Apart from the effect on sweetness, reducing sugar can also have an impact on colour and texture, so the taste panel was also asked to score on these parameters. The results were the same, showing that that participants liked the reference biscuit and the product with most sugar reduction in the chocolate best.