Revealed in the 2017 ‘Nestle in Society–Creating Shared Value’ report, the FMCG giant outline its “ground-breaking” discovery on sugar structure. Essentially, the FMCG giant has found a method to restructure the sugar crystals so that they dissolve more rapidly on the tongue.  The upshot is that less sugar would be required in the production process. And impressively, Nestle anticipates that such a move could reduce the sugar content in its products by as much as 40 per cent.

 

The potentially revolutionary discovery was made back in 2016, and the company has since been scaling up its technology, with a view to launching its first products of the back off that in mid-2018.

 

The new ‘structured sugar’ is being produced at Nestle’s factory in Dalston in Cumbria – the result of UK government pressure on food companies to cut the sugar to help curb childhood obesity.

 

The project forms part of Nestle’s on-going pledge to drive down sugar content in its products. The food giant started its sugar reduction journey back in 2000, and it made its first public commitment to reduce sugars in a range of products by 10 per cent between 2014 and 2016. “This was aligned with the World Healt Organization’s (WHO) guideline recommending that people keep free sugars below 10 per cent of total energy intake,” stated the report. 

 

At that point in time, only seven per cent of Nestle’s food and beverages actually fell into scope of that commitment, as all other products already met the ‘below 10 per cent’ stipulation. 

 

Now, the company is looking to extend that commitment by reducing the sugar content threshold in its products to just five per cent. “We are pleased that currently more than half of our foods and beverages currently provide less than five per cent energy from free sugars,” the company said in its report. We will now reduce sugars by five per cent in the remaining roughly 45 per cent. This is an ambitious task,” stated the report, considering consumer demand for more natural and tastier products.”

 

Last year, Nestle successfully slashed the sugar content in its KitKat brand by around seven per cent, and earlier this year it launched Milkybar Wowsomes – a product containing 30 per cent less sugar than regular Milkybars.

 

The firm hopes that such efforts, combined with a global roll-out of portion control across its portfolio this year, will help to remove around 2,100 tonnes of sugar from people’s diets every year.