Icon Foods launches innovative low-calorie sweetener blend

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Icon Foods (Portland, OR) has introduced an innovative new sweetener blend called IconiSweet, which combines allulose, erythritol, stevia, and monk fruit. The blend takes advantage of each of the sweeteners’ advantages while eliminating their individual drawbacks.

“Each sweetener has its own quirks, and developers have spent countless hours tinkering with combinations to offset different flavor notes alone, for example,” says Thom King, president and CEO of Icon Foods, in a press release. “Now you have a product that combines each of them, bringing forth their attributes at optimum levels to create an entirely new sweetener.”

Within the blend, erythritol and allulose mitigate off notes from stevia and monk fruit, erythritol drives down freezing point depression, allulose increases frozen-dessert overrun, and completely offsets any cooling effect erythritol might add to candy. Additionally, erythritol lowers water activity, extending shelf life and baked goods, and participates in the Maillard reaction, giving baked good their golden brown hue.

“This is probably the cleanest, most versatile sweetening system I have ever worked with,” adds King. “It brings all these ingredients together in perfect proportion, reducing time on the bench as well as number of attempts, not to mention providing both clean flavor and a clean-label opportunity.”