MONTREAL AND PETACH TIKVA, ISRAEL — DouxMatok, a food technology company based in Israel, has developed a cane sugar-based ingredient that has been shown to reduce sugar in applications by up to 40%. Food and beverage companies in North America soon should have opportunities to test out the sugar now that DouxMatok and Rogers Sugar Inc., based in Canada and the parent company of Lantic, Inc., are collaborating. Lantic will manufacture the sugar. DouxMatok will handle marketing and selling.
DouxMatok has a patented technology that maximizes the efficiency of sugar delivery to the sweet taste receptors, which enhances people’s perception of the sweetness.
“If you can improve the efficiency of the delivery of sugar within a cake to the taste receptors, you will be perceiving a lot more sweetness with less sugar,” said Eran Baniel, chief executive officer of DouxMatok. “You won’t need that much sugar. Efficient flavor delivery is what we bring to the table. You can do more with less.”
Besides cakes, other potential applications include cookies, confectionery items and chocolate.
Lantic and DouxMatok over the past two years worked to go from pilot testing to commercial scale manufacturing within Lantic’s existing sugar refining business.
“They were wonderful partners, taking us from making one or a dozen kilos of sugar into making tonnes of sugar,” Mr. Baniel said.
Lantic operates cane sugar refineries in Montreal and Vancouver, BC, as well as a sugar beet processing facility in Taber, Alta. Lantic’s sugar products are marketed under the Lantic trademark in eastern Canada and the Rogers trademark in western Canada. The DouxMatok sugar will be based on cane sugar.
“We are extremely pleased to have secured an exclusive cane sugar manufacturing agreement with DouxMatok for this innovative technology that adds an important and much desired customer solution to our natural sweetener portfolio,” said John Holliday, president and CEO of Lantic. “As we see a noticeable trend toward a return to natural cane sugar in many consumer products, the reduction of 30% to 50% in sugar content makes this move even more compelling. With proven commercial manufacturing in place, we are ready to support the commercialization of this new solution to food companies in the US market.”
The two companies already are working with select food companies to support the development of new products as well as the reformulation of existing products to contain less sugar, more fiber and more protein.
“There is some available now, and there will be more beginning in January,” Mr. Daniel said of DouxMatok sugar. “There is sugar available to people who want to be first.”
DouxMatok can work with other ingredients besides DouxMatok, said Liat Cinamon, vice president of business development. An example would be taking 100% of the sugar out of a customer’s product and replacing 50% of it with DouxMatok and 50% of it with other ingredients, like fiber or protein, to add nutritional value.
DouxMatok in July 2018 partnered with Südzucker, a sugar company in Europe, to commercialize the DouxMatok sugar throughout Europe.
“At the moment with the pull we see from North America and being a small company, we have moved our resources first to conclude the launch of the work in North America before we go back and continue the work in Europe,” Mr. Baniel said.
He stressed that DouxMatok is sugar, which means it has sugar functionalities like color, mouthfeel and no aftertaste. Like sugar, DouxMatok sugar has 4 calories per gram, but using less of the DouxMatok sugar in applications results in fewer calories from sugar.
“Sugar is so many things besides sweetness,” Mr. Baniel said. “That is what allows us to differentiate ourselves, the fact that we are sugar-based.”