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Stevia First Corp collaborating on sugary beverage consumption in LatAm
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Saturday, 28 March, 2015, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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Our Bureau, Bengaluru
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fiogf49gjkf0d Stevia First Corp, an agricultural biotechnology company based in California’s Central Valley growing region, is focussed on industrial scale production of stevia, the all-natural zero-calorie sweetener.
Currently stevia is rapidly transforming the food and beverage industry and a slew of key technology development and sales collaborations are intended to transform sugary beverage consumption in Mexico and Latin America.
The company has initiated the development of technology and outreach efforts aimed at enabling widespread transformation of bottling operations in Mexico by targeting effective methods to shift large-scale beverage industry suppliers away from sugar-loaded sodas in the country. These efforts are being led at Stevia First by Fernando Rodriguez Orozco, a senior process engineer, who has worked exclusively within the Coca-Cola supply chain in Mexico for 20 years, including the installation of sugar processing facilities that total more than 300,000 tonne of annual production.
The company’s development focus is intended to rapidly enable and train bottlers in Mexico on how to transform from sugar-loaded drinks to lower-calorie options including products enabled with stevia. In this regard, it is introducing novel processing steps that reduce the risk of product contamination compared to methods used commonly by overseas stevia producers.
Further, the company is developing methods that could enable beverage makers to cost-effectively use stevia with cane sugar, a hallmark of Mexican coke. These methods may be implemented at existing sugar processing facilities, and are intended for contract supply from the proposed first dedicated stevia processing facilities in North America, which the company plans to construct in California.
As detailed in a 2013 report by Credit Suisse, type 2 diabetes is the leading cause of death in Mexico. The country ranks second in the world in adult obesity, first in type 2 diabetes, and fourth in infant obesity. Mexico ranks second globally in added sugar consumption per person and second in the amount of soft drinks consumed per person. Approximately 95% of soft drinks consumed are full-calorie, sugar-loaded drinks. As a result, in 2014 a nationwide tax on sugary drinks went into effect.
According to Robert Brooke, CEO, Stevia First Corp, sugar-sweetened beverage taxes and increasing public health awareness is leading to marked shifts in consumer habits in Mexico, the US, and elsewhere.
“As a company, we are positioned ideally to enable these healthy changes through the use of stevia in particular, which as a zero-calorie natural sweetener we believe will be part of the solution for decades to come,” he added.
The market for all-natural, zero-calorie stevia sweeteners is expanding rapidly. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates stevia intake could eventually replace 20-30% of all dietary sweeteners. The total global sweetener market was estimated at $58.3 billion in 2010.
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