The New Yorker: The Race to Redesign Sugar

Every workday, at ten o’clock, at noon, and at three in the afternoon, Eran Baniel receives an alert on his phone: the call to taste. When I joined him on a Monday morning in January, in an office park a few miles east of Tel Aviv, he was sitting at a desk with two white china plates of Petit Beurre cookies in front of him. The cookies looked identical, but a label identified the plate on Baniel’s left as 792, and the one on his right as 431. “Petit Beurre is our preferred platform,” Baniel told me, breaking off a corner of a 792 cookie and crunching it thoughtfully. “It’s fast to make and fast to taste.” He sipped some water, took a leftover shard of 431, and invited me to join him as he repeated the process. The second cookie tasted better somehow—a little more buttery, maybe—but that was not what Baniel was assessing. The two sets of cookies had been made with the same recipe, except that one batch contained forty per cent less sugar. The question that Baniel had to answer was: which?

Baniel, a former actor now in his mid-seventies, has expressive eyebrows and a theatrical baritone. In 2014, he became the founding C.E.O. of DouxMatok, an Israeli startup that is now releasing its first product: sugar crystals that have been redesigned to taste sweeter, so that you can put forty per cent fewer of them in a Petit Beurre and it will still taste as sweet as the original. The company has branded its sugar Incredo, a name that gestures toward the disbelief that greets any suggestion that we might be able to have our cake while eating only half the sugar, too.

At the company’s headquarters, every available surface seemed to be laden with Incredo-sweetened treats — cookies, chocolates, gummy bears, jars of cocoa-hazelnut paste. In blind tastings conducted by a consumer-research company, more than two-thirds of a panel of ordinary consumers said they preferred the Incredo Petit Beurres to the full-sugar ones, and seventy-four per cent indicated that they’d rather buy the Incredo version of Nutella than the real thing. It won’t be long before they can: later this year, Incredo will enter commercial production with Südzucker, Europe’s biggest sugar producer, as well as with one of the leading refined-sugar distributors in North America, whose identity, I was told, had to remain undisclosed.

Such secrecy is unsurprising in an industry dominated by multinational corporations all spending large amounts on research and development in pursuit of the same goal: to continue selling countless sweet things in a world that is increasingly wary of sugar. In 2015, the World Health Organization recommended that no more than ten per cent — and, ideally, less than five — of an adult’s daily energy intake should come from sugar. In other words, an average adult, with a daily consumption of two thousand calories, ought to consume no more than six teaspoons of sugar a day—the amount found in a generous schmear of Nutella, and quite a bit less than the contents of a can of Coke. The following year, the Obama Administration announced new rules requiring companies to disclose their products’ added-sugar content on the Nutrition Facts label. Some governments have gone further. Many countries, especially in Europe and South America, have begun placing health-warning labels on, and taxing, products containing more than a teaspoon or two of sugar per three ounces—a category that includes many things that people think of as innocuous, such as breakfast cookies, oatmeal muffins, and nutrition bars.

These measures seem to be having an impact. Recent surveys report that seventy per cent of Americans are concerned about the sugar in their diets, and U.K. shoppers rate sugar content as the most important factor in making healthy food choices. As public opinion turns against sugar, food companies have outdone one another in pledges to cut the quantities of it that appear in their products. Pepsi has promised that by 2025 at least two-thirds of its drinks will contain a hundred calories or fewer from added sweeteners. A consortium of candy companies, including Mars Wrigley, Ferrero, and Russell Stover, recently declared that by 2022 half of their single-serving products will contain at most two hundred calories per pack. Nestlé has resolved to use five per cent less added sugar by the end of this year—though, as of January, it still had more than twenty thousand tons of the stuff left to eliminate.

The problem is that sugar isn’t easy to replace. Despite scientists’ best efforts in the past century, none of the artificial alternatives that have been developed are quite as irresistible, let alone as versatile in the kitchen. The looming impact of new nutrition standards, combined with regulatory pressure and public sentiment, has led to something of a panic in the industry, and a flurry of innovation. The new race — in which DouxMatok is only one of several competitors — is not to develop a substitute for sugar but to design a better sugar altogether.