While the sparkling water market is heating up rapidly, it also makes the sugar substitute represented by erythritol really enter the consumer's vision.
Since the beginning of this year, the market price of erythritol has risen from 16,000 yuan / ton at the beginning of the year to more than 30,000 yuan / ton, and the quotation of individual manufacturers is even as high as 36,000 yuan / ton, which is double the price at the beginning of the year.
The sharp contradiction between supply and demand makes erythritol even more difficult to find, and it is said that erythritol manufacturers have adopted bidding methods to sell it.
Image source: Network
Crazy sparkling water, soaring erythritol
In recent years, driven by the great health trend, consumers' demand for health has become more and more intense, and the sparkling water with 0 sugar, 0 fat and 0 calories has successfully seized this outlet, showing a trend of explosive growth.
According to Nielsen data, the national sales of "0 sugar" sparkling water have nearly doubled in recent years, and forward-looking data also shows that the overall market size of domestic sparkling water in 2019 is about 15 billion yuan, and it is expected to reach 40 billion in 2025.
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Sugar-free beverages are actually not a new thing, as early as 2005, Coca-Cola launched aspartame as a sweetener zero degree cola, and then launched a new product with acesulfame, steviol glycosides, sucralose as sweeteners, but the market response has been ordinary. Until the emergence of zero-sugar sparkling water, sugar-free beverages really became popular in the market and became a fragrant feast that beverage companies are flocking to.
The biggest difference between sparkling water and previous sugar-free drinks is that sparkling water is based on erythritol as the main sweetener. So the question is, how did erythritol beat other sweeteners, c-bit debut?
There are so many sugar substitutes, why is the fire erythritol?
Erythritol is the only sugar alcohol product on the market that is prepared by natural transformation and extraction by biological fermentation method, which is a sugar-free natural sweetener recognized by the National Health and Family Planning Commission, which does not participate in human blood sugar metabolism, stable acid and thermal performance, and the sweetness characteristics are similar to sucrose. Compared with synthetic sweeteners such as sucralose, erythritol can be classified as a natural sweetener; compared with natural sweeteners such as steviol, erythritol has a purer taste and no bitterness; coupled with the marketing publicity of Internet celebrity products, it has gained the recognition of the majority of consumers.
But erythritol is not perfect! First of all, sugar alcohols will be used by bacteria in the large intestine, producing gas and causing bloating and bowel sounds, and even cause diarrhea.
Even erythritol, the most tolerated of sugar alcohols, is at risk of causing bowel ringing diarrhea. Thus, the upper limits of tolerance for adults and children with erythritol are 0.78 g and 0.71 g per kilogram of body weight, respectively. In order to ensure that children can also eat it safely, the European Food Safety Authority eventually recommended a limit of 0.6 grams of erythritol per serving of food or beverage[1].
Secondly, the sweetness of erythritol is only 70% of sucrose, although it mainly plays a role in improving taste, but the cost is 4-6 times that of sucrose, with the introduction of more and more new products of sparkling water, the price of erythritol has continued to rise.
Finally, on the supply side, the vast majority of the global erythritol production capacity is concentrated in China, the current domestic erythritol manufacturers with a certain production scale of only 4-5, the total production capacity of about 100,000 tons, far from meeting the market demand, so that many sparkling water production enterprises because they can not purchase raw materials and have to postpone the product listing plan.
The inner coil is serious, how can the bubble water producer get out of the predicament?
As more beverage companies begin to devote themselves to the production of sparkling water, the sparkling water market is undergoing an unprecedented "inner volume". This phenomenon is not only because the price increase of erythritol leads to an increase in the cost of formulas, squeezing the gross profit space of enterprises, but also because new products on the market continue to emerge, making consumers put forward higher requirements for the flavor of sparkling water.
How to break the homogeneous competition and develop unique and differentiated products has become an urgent task in front of all beverage developers.
The theory of food science tells us that beverage preference is the subjective perception of objective flavor.
The whole element of flavor perception includes the taste system, the olfactory system, and the oral-trigeminal tactile system. The human taste system refers to the receptors that feel the sense of taste, that is, the tongue and the nervous system connecting the tongue and the brain; the oral-trigeminal nerve haptic system includes the haptic, trigeminal nerve sensory and kinesthetic receptors in the mouth and nasal cavity; the olfactory system is composed of prenasal and postnasal olfactory receptors that capture aroma.
Together, these elements act on the areas of the brain's sense of bliss for an extraordinary pleasurable experience. Among them, the role of postnasal smell is particularly important, is the main component of taste perception, as Yale University Gordon Shepherd said, "Flavor can bring the most extraordinary pleasure experience, and flavor is perceived by the brain, 80% of flavor perception is determined by the aroma behind the nose [2]. ”
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bibliography
[1] European Food Safety Authority (2015) scientific opinion on the safety of recommending the extension of erythritol (e968) as a food additive. EFSA Journal 13 (3): 4033. Ministry of the Interior: 10.2903/j.efsa.2015.4033, issn 1831-4732.
[2] Neuronourism, Gordon M. Shepherd
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