FDBusiness.com

PureCircle has announced a new line of stevia ingredients that delivers taste innovation surpassing other options available today. PureCircle Matrix Solutions is a new family of stevia ingredients that have been optimized for specific category applications and performs more similarly to sugar enabling deeper calorie reductions.

Jason Hecker, PureCircle’s President of Group Sales and Marketing, says: “Our tailored approach to innovation is unique in the industry. Matrix Solutions brings together more than a decade of PureCircle research and development and offers the very best of taste innovation to our customers.”

The PureCircle Matrix Solutions family includes new stevia ingredient Sigma-T, an ingredient with a clean sweetness profile, reduced astringency and bitterness and a sweet aftertaste that performs parity to sugar at mid-level sugar reductions. It joins the first product in the Matrix Solutions Family, Sigma-D, a dairy specific ingredient with a clean sweetness profile and preference to Reb A on key attributes, such as bitterness and licorice aftertaste. It has enabled customers to achieve no sugar added solutions with natural-origin, zero calorie sweeteners for the first time and was launched at Health Ingredients Europe in December 2014.

“The ingredients significantly outperform first generation Reb A solutions and come from our deep understanding of steviol glycoside research,” says John Martin, PureCircle’s Global Director for Technical Development and Innovation. “To see them perform similar to sugar on key attributes in our sensory panels is really an accomplishment.”

PureCircle Matrix Solutions brings together the company’s expertise in working with the stevia leaf and its proprietary, predictive modeling technology to give customers a superior stevia solution for different food and beverage categories that cuts development time by 30-50 percent.

“Understanding the complexity of the leaf and how it works in a specific product applications can take up a lot of development resources and time, but these solutions take the guesswork out of stevia development,” John  Martin adds.

PureCircle’s food scientists at its Centers of Category Excellence have spent years working on Matrix Solutions, building upon steviol glycoside research learnings since the company’s inception. PureCircle expects to expand the family of ingredients to other categories within the next year.