Does anyone know why thaumatin and the sweetest chemicals on the Wikipedia sweetness table aren’t more common? With sweetness more than 100k times that of sucrose they should both save on costs and have lower risk of adverse health effects compared to e.g. aspartame.
Indeed. The incentives to put new ones on the market are very limited, due to legalities and economics.
A corporation has a limited window of patent monopoly, so a fairly short time period to recoup their investment to develop, licence and build out manufacturing capacity—thus need to sell it for a high price or sell high volumes.
It is a long and expensive process to get a new compound approved for use as a food additive, and it needs to be done separately in each major jurisdiction—at least China, USA and EU.
A new sweetener is directly competing against all the other ones that are already on the market—merely ‘being much sweeter’ isn’t enough. It has to be significiantly better in some other way, if only because it will be considerably more expensive at first.
That’s a great question, this is totally mysterious to me. There are a lot of examples of people putting thaumatin in transgenic fruits or vegetables (and somehow in the milk of transgenic mice because there’s always one creepy study), but I don’t know why it hasn’t been commercialized. It sounds like superfruits would make a nice healthy alternative to palm-oil-and-chocolate-based comfort foods. Maybe it’s a regulatory problem?
Does anyone know why thaumatin and the sweetest chemicals on the Wikipedia sweetness table aren’t more common? With sweetness more than 100k times that of sucrose they should both save on costs and have lower risk of adverse health effects compared to e.g. aspartame.
I’d expect artificial sweeteners are already very cheap, and most people want more tested chemicals.
Indeed. The incentives to put new ones on the market are very limited, due to legalities and economics.
A corporation has a limited window of patent monopoly, so a fairly short time period to recoup their investment to develop, licence and build out manufacturing capacity—thus need to sell it for a high price or sell high volumes.
It is a long and expensive process to get a new compound approved for use as a food additive, and it needs to be done separately in each major jurisdiction—at least China, USA and EU.
A new sweetener is directly competing against all the other ones that are already on the market—merely ‘being much sweeter’ isn’t enough.
It has to be significiantly better in some other way, if only because it will be considerably more expensive at first.
That’s a great question, this is totally mysterious to me. There are a lot of examples of people putting thaumatin in transgenic fruits or vegetables (and somehow in the milk of transgenic mice because there’s always one creepy study), but I don’t know why it hasn’t been commercialized. It sounds like superfruits would make a nice healthy alternative to palm-oil-and-chocolate-based comfort foods. Maybe it’s a regulatory problem?
“Ow! My bones are so brittle. But I always drink plenty of… ‘malk’‽”