What about the sweeteners in Queal?

June 14^th 2019

We have arrived at the explanations of smaller ingredients in our products. They’re smaller in terms of quantity but certainly worth mentioning. The first of these “small” ingredients - but very often cited by customers or complete food users in general - are sweeteners. What are these sweeteners exactly and why do we use them in our recipes? Let’s elaborate!

What is it?

We use two types of sweeteners in our recipes; glucose syrup and sucralose. Glucose syrup is a syrup commonly made from maize (corn) - therefore also called “corn syrup”. In some cases, glucose syrup can be made from potatoes, wheat, barley, rice, and cassava. You’ll find a lot of applications of glucose syrup in pastries and sweets as well.

Sucralose is made by replacing three OH-groups in a sugar molecule with 3 chlorine atoms. It is the only low-calorie “sugar” that has the exact same taste. Although the similarity in taste, sucralose’s flavour is a lot more intense (it’s 600 times sweeter than normal sugar). Because of sucralose’s complex structure, most of it can not be broken down by the human body. The part (roughly 15%) that is digestible does not provide energy thus does not add calories or carbohydrates to your food. All absorbed sucralose is quickly excreted in the urine.

How do we use it?

We only use a tiny bit of both sweeteners in Ready and Steady recipes. Glucose syrup is used individually in the Dark Chocolate Go bar, and some sucralose in added Flow to improve its taste. Both ingredients are present for less than 1% in all recipes.

Why do we use it?

We use both ingredients, surprise, surprise, to increase the sweetness of our products while not higher the calories or carbohydrates. Although some would criticise the use of these non-natural/processed forms of sugar, we carefully chose them as our ingredients and think that there’s currently no better (read: more efficient, cheaper and/or safer) low-calorie alternative. Glucose syrup as well as sucralose both are declared safe by the EFSA (the European Food and Safety Authority, on whose guidelines we base our nutritional values) and for the latter, the safe upper limits are both far above what’s in our products.

Where does it come from?

The glucose syrup in our products mainly comes from France, Belgium and Austria and is added via the creamer we use. The sucralose is imported from China.

Allergens.

No allergens are present in both the glucose syrup and sucralose we use. Some can be sensitive to sweeteners, mostly resulting in digestive problems and/or headache.