Consumers Continue to Demand All-Natural Sugar

A special third-party expert commentary for ISCNewsroom.com from Andy Briscoe, President & CEO, The Sugar Association:

Consumers continue to clamor for foods and drinks sweetened with all-natural sugar. Products such as Heinz and Hunt’s ketchup, Pepsi Throwback, Snapple, Gatorade, and Wheat Thins are just a few of the household names to answer the call. Click here for a current list.

Andy Briscoe, President & CEO, The Sugar Association.

Starbucks, one of the nation’s biggest restaurant chains, summed up its decision to use sugar in its food products: “We heard loud and clear from our customers that they want food, when they purchase food at Starbucks, to be made of high quality ingredients and from simple recipes.”

Of course, those same consumers would probably be fuming if many of these same manufacturers scrapped all-natural sugar and replaced it with artificial or man-made sweeteners, such as neotame, sorbitol, and polydextrose.

A recent Harris Interactive poll found that 52 percent of parents make a conscious effort to avoid artificial sweeteners, yet few are actually able to identify common sweeteners used in food products.

With such overwhelming evidence that consumers want natural products like sugar, you might think a move to artificials would never happen. Think again.

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans are currently being revised, and the federal government is under pressure to recommend limiting Americans’ sugar intake to as little as possible. If this happens, manufacturers would be left with little recourse but to reformulate their recipes.

And if they reformulate, many consumers may not even realize it.

When shown the ingredient label of a popular children’s product, given to dehydrated infants, only four percent of parents could identify all the sweeteners. About one in seven (13 percent) parents couldn’t identify any of the four sweeteners used.

Considering 87 percent of parents say the sweetener used in a product is at least somewhat important to them when making food decisions for their kids, they have a desire and right to know what sweeteners they are feeding their family.

The Sugar Association has petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to follow Canada’s lead and clear up consumer confusion with front-of-package labeling for artificial sweeteners. For nearly five years, this petition has been tangled in government red tape while new sweeteners come on the market each year and some even change their names to be less recognizable.

Andy Briscoe, President and CEO of the Sugar Association said, “We know consumers are confused by the more than 25 sweeteners being used in the U.S. market. Consumers have a right to know what is in their food, and the current FDA labeling standards aren’t working.”

We’re confident that when given all the facts, Americans will make the same choice people have made for more than 2,000 years: sugar.