Stevia FDA Approval

This business item is something that I stumbled into and thought that I should share it with you. This is the beginning of the stevia market in the USA. When I first investigated stevia, it was argued that the FDA was protecting the sugar trade. That was likely true.

I found it outrageous that a completely proven natural sweetener, clearly superior to all synthetics was been held off the market.

It was grown in England during the second war, and amazingly it holds a 5% market share in Japan. That is not small potatoes.

A really good application that I would like to see is a glucose beverage sweetened with it. Glucose is a sugar that goes directly into the bloodstream with minimal impact on other digestive processes. Its weakness is a modest sweetness compared to sugar. This would be a superior way to ingest your coke if stevia becomes the sweetness source.

In any case, it has long been understood that we are dangerously addicted to far too much sugar in our diets. Get rid of it and our sensitivity will reset at a much lower level.

If you want to ruin your day, count the number of cups of sweetened drinks that you have every day. Then estimate the spoons of sugar used. Then spoon a like amount into a cup and look at it. Would you eat it?

I did that to my coffee habit fifteen years ago and that was the end of that.



New drinks review: stevia gaining ground as the new sweetener of choice
Tue. January 20, 2009; Posted: 06:15 AM

Jan 20, 2009 (Datamonitor via COMTEX) The natural sweetener stevia has gained much attention in recent weeks after the US Food and Drug Administration approved the sweetener for use in foodstuffs. Following the approval, a number of manufacturers have introduced new stevia products, including Coca Cola and PepsiCo. As a result, the product can be expected to gain further exposure in 2009.

PepsiCo has launched the SoBe Lifewater Vitamin Enhanced Water beverage, a new line of soft drinks which contains an extract of the stevia leaf called PureVia, in the US. The extract is said to provide a sweet taste but without the calories of sugar, and is promoted on the fact that it is a natural product, unlike other available sugar substitutes. Now that stevia has official approval, PepsiCo is likely to include it in a rising number of new products.

PepsiCo rival Coca Cola has also released a new drink that contains an extract of stevia leaf in the US. Sprite Green Naturally Sweetened Soda contains a stevia leaf extract called Truvia. However, while the new SoBe line is said to contain no calories, Sprite Green is said to contain 50 calories per 8.5-ounce serving which, according to the company, is 50% fewer calories than regular soda.

Staying with the health theme, Javalution Coffee has launched the JavaFit Ready to Drink Latte, a line of functional, ready-to-drink coffee beverages, in the US. The line includes Diet Plus, Extreme, Focus and Immune varieties, which each claim to have a functional benefit. The Diet Plus variety, for example, is described as a lower calorie, lower fat, high powered blend that can help to suppress the appetite and support weight loss programs. Such products could help to reposition coffee, reversing its somewhat negative image to present it as a healthier beverage.

Meanwhile, Rubyy has launched an energy drink in the US under its company name. This is a premium style of energy drink that is presented in a distinctive black aluminum bottle. The drink is available in an orange flavor which contains the juice of various orange varieties including blood oranges, tangerines and Valencia oranges. The company claims that this provides the beverage with a superior taste. The energy drinks market is currently saturated with products, but this high-end launch could stand out from the crowd.

Over in Europe, more specifically Spain, Finland, Portugal, France, Italy, and Norway, PepsiCo is capitalizing on the popularity of mojito beverages with the launch of Pepsi Mojito. The mojito is a blend of mint and lime which has traditionally been used in alcoholic drinks. This version pairs lime and mint in a cola, in both diet and non-diet varieties, showing that the mojito flavor is moving into the soft drinks market.

Finally, a recent Japanese launch claims to feature a new type of super carrot. Ito En has introduced Ito En Kokusan 100 Yasai, a vegetable juice drink that is made with 12 types of selected vegetables. However, helping it to stand out from the crowd is the fact that the "connoisseur" carrots used in the drink are said to contain 1.5 times as much beta-carotene as normal carrots. The carrots are processed through the Natural Sweet Method, which is said to enhance the sweetness of carrots without using sugar or salt. This new drink appears to be a first in the juice market.

http://www.datamonitor.com

Green Fungi

I am posting here an article that generated media interest the last two days with the headline ‘Green algae’

When I first reviewed what work was been reported on regarding the processing of cellulose I came away rather pessimistic. What makes it so enticing is the fact that cellulose is a string of glucose molecules tightly tied together. In other words, all the wood in a tree is on one level, pure glucose. What is also wonderfully obvious is that Mother Nature did a great job keeping it all together. It was not going to be solved by something easy.

Since then I reported that a research group was studying how termites pulled it off with the idea of isolating the right enzymes. It was nice to see this promising work started. It will surely take years to produce a viable protocol out of this form of basic research.

Now we have work commenced on a well known fungus with a previous history of converting cellulose into simple sugars. This appears most promising of all since a lot of prior work has gone into this particular fungus.

It is suddenly no longer far fetched to envisage grinders chewing up corn stover and the like to be fed into a continuous process vat in which the sweetened fluids are drawn off to the fermenter. This technology surely lends itself to small scale processing operations.

This is a potential protocol that can be adapted to the farm gate with very little fresh labor input and would add a useful new revenue stream beside internalizing the energy needs.



In a paper published today in Nature Biotechnology, researchers led by Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute announced that the genetic sequence of the fungus Tricoderma reesei has uncovered important clues about how the organism breaks down plant fibers into simple sugars. The finding could unlock possibilities for industrial processes that can more efficiently and cost effectively convert corn, switchgrass and even cellulose-based municipal waste into ethanol. Ethanol from waste products is a more-carbon-neutral alternative to gasoline.

The fungus T. reesei rose to dubious fame during World War II when military leaders discovered it was responsible for rapid deterioration of clothing and tents in the South Pacific. Named after Dr. Elwyn T. Reese, who, with colleagues, originally isolated the hungry fungus, T. reesei was later identified as a source of industrial enzymes and a role model for the conversion of cellulose and hemicellulose—plant fibers--into simple sugars.
The organism uses enzymes it creates to break down human-indigestible fibers of plants into the simplest form of sugar, known as a monosaccharide. The fungus then digests the sugars as food. Researchers decoded the genetic sequence of T. reesei in an attemptto discover why the deep green fungus was so darned good at digesting plant cells. The sequence results were somewhat surprising. Contrary to what one might predict about the gene content of a fungus that can eat holes in tents, T. reesei had fewer genes dedicated to the production of cellulose-eating enzymes than its counterparts.

"We were aware of T. reesei's reputation as producer of massive quantities of degrading enzymes, however we were surprised by how few enzyme types it produces, which suggested to us that its protein secretion system is exceptionally efficient," said Los Alamos bioscientist Diego Martinez (also at the University of New Mexico), the study's lead author. The researchers believe that T. reesei's genome includes "clusters" of enzyme-producing genes, a strategy that may account for the organism's efficiency at breaking down cellulose. On an industrial scale, T. reesei could be employed to secrete enzymes that can be purified and added into an aqueous mixture of cellulose pulp and other materials to produce sugar. The sugar can then be fermented by yeast to produce ethanol.

"The sequencing of the Trichoderma reesei genome is a major step towards using renewable feedstocks for the production of fuels and chemicals," said Joel Cherry, director of research activities in second-generation biofuels for Novozymes, a collaborating institution in the study. "The information contained in its genome will allow us to better understand how this organism degrades cellulose so efficiently and to understand how it produces the required enzymes so prodigiously. Using this information, it may be possible to improve both of these properties, decreasing the cost of converting cellulosic biomass to fuels and chemicals."

Celluose conversion

The fundamental roadblock that we face in the conversion to an ethanol based fuel economy is the economic conversion of cellulose feed stocks into firstly glucose and then ethanol. We actually understand how this is done - see the link for a quick explanation.

There is no lack of various feed stocks even if once again we lean on corn stalks. Every individual feedstock will present their own individual conversion issues which will obviously impact on the cost. On average though, fifty percent of the feed stock will be separable as cellulose, leaving lignins and other byproducts. This feed stock can then in theory be converted to glucose. After all, a cow does just that.

There exists a great deal of current optimism that this is achievable. I am personally very cautious in this regard. We have not lacked major research on this problem over the past century. It has been a valuable option from the beginning of organic chemistry. And the results have been unsatisfactory.

The difficulty is that we now need to economically solve this problem for a wide range of feed stocks. We can sort of do it at a high cost. Can we bring this cost down?

We already know that half of any feedstock is not cellulose. We can also expect that the recoverable portion after a chemical soak will be perhaps eighty percent of the available cellulose. Thus a first major cost will be the neutralization of the chemical soak, dehydration of the waste and its carbonization. And the volumes exceed that of the produced cellulose. We are looking at a sixty - forty split of waste and product.

Then, with our current knowledge we treat this cellulose with expensive enzymes to produce glucose. At that juncture, we are then able to do classic fermentation and alcohol production. This all promises to be a ghastly technical headache and has been to date.

What we obviously require is a handy microbe that loves dead plant material and does all this for us, including the production of alcohol. It still promises to be an incredibly slow production system. One envisages large vats of wood chips with a sprinkler recycling fluids for months on end. Not an attractive plan and the need for profitability ensures a catastrophic price for the end product.

So yes, we can see how it could work. Right now, the likely cost base means it will be anything but cellulose first.