FDBusiness.com

Stevia products manufacturer PureCircle has announced that it has achieved what the company calls “a major milestone” as the company prepares to commercialise its latest stevia innovation, PureCircle’s high purity Reb D. Following a detailed safety evaluation by an independent expert panel, PureCircle’s high purity Reb D has received self-affirmed GRAS status, and PureCircle has elected to formally submit its GRAS notification to the FDA for the agency’s additional safety review.

PureCircle says that its research has identified high purity Reb D as having one of the best sweetness profiles of any steviol glycoside from the stevia leaf. The clean sweetness of PureCircle’s high purity Reb D will, according to the company, further enable customers to develop naturally sweetened formulations with very low to no calories, particularly in food and beverages with higher sweetness levels, such as carbonated soft drinks. PureCircle believes that its commercialisation will play an integral role in extending the company’s breakthrough Stevia 3.0 innovation platform alongside other next generation innovations, such as PureCircle Alpha, SG95 and PureCircle flavor NSF-02.

PureCircle said that its Reb D commercialisation follows more than a decade of research and development that takes advantage of breakthroughs across the company’s entire vertically integrated supply chain. The development is said to have been made possible as a result of discoveries through PureCircle’s Comprehensive Breeding Program involving in-house and partner (3rd party) breeding centres, its agricultural investment across Paraguay, Kenya, China and the United States and its extraction and purification capabilities. In addition to proprietary high Reb D content leaf varieties, PureCircle has now secured process, method and application patents to protect this new innovation, including a suite of more than 25 patents and patent applications for the ingredient.

According to PureCircle, it has begun collaborating with several customers on product development, with primary focus on initial introductions in the United States. Substantial investments are focused on scaling this new technology with plans for targeted market introduction as early as the second half of 2013.

“With PureCircle’s Stevia 3.0 platform we are bringing our customers the next generation of stevia solutions,” said Magomet Malsagov, CEO at PureCircle. “We are confident that PureCircle’s Reb D introduction will be a powerful new addition to this platform and will unlock new reduced and zero calorie food and beverage solutions. Over the past two years, we have dramatically accelerated the pace of new stevia solutions to the global market. PureCircle was founded on the knowledge that the stevia leaf is a vast source of innovation and we continue to have a rich pipeline of future solutions to come.”