Milkybar Wowsomes melt in your mouth like candy floss. They might have a cringe-making name but, washed down with a can of Irn-Bru, they may be the taste of the future. The low-sugar future, that is.
Nestlé, one of the most criticised of the handful of companies that dominate processed food across the globe, has put itself on the side of the angels in the great battle for our girths being waged by Public Health England (PHE) on behalf of the UK government. It has found a high-tech way to make its Wowsomes with 30% less sugar than standard Milkybars. Furthermore, the giant company claims to have taken 2.6bn teaspoons of sugar out of its food and drinks over the past three years – an extraordinary claim that might cause some to question what on earth so much sugar was doing in them in the first place.
The war on sugar is making ground. On Friday, the sugar tax on soft drinks will come into effect, hitting any that contain more than 5g of sugar per 100ml. The manufacturers will have to pay a levy of 18p a litre to the Treasury, or 24p a litre if the sugar content is over 8g per 100ml. Some drinks prices will rise. Many will not, because the drinks manufacturers have found ways to get the sugar levels down, usually with artificial sweeteners.
But that’s not all. Food companies were instructed a year ago by PHE to cut the sugar in their products by 20% by 2020, and 5% in the first 12 months – hence the birth of Milkybar Wowsomes. It is voluntary, but the industry is under no illusion that if it doesn’t co-operate, the government will do something more brutal – probably imposing another sugar tax, this time on what we eat.
For years the food and drink industry did little to help with the obesity crisis, holding to the line that it was an individual’s responsibility to keep an eye on their weight and their absolute right to choose the foods they liked, while blaming lack of exercise and the TV culture. Governments let them get away with it, or indulged in a bit of gesture politics.
But the days of the responsibility deal – an initiative of the 2010-2015 coalition government – are long gone. Food companies must look back wistfully at the panels convened by Andrew Lansley, then health secretary, where companies would offer to cut a few calories here, do a bit of labelling there and never got called to account. There was no real measurement of what was being done, because different companies made different pledges and comparisons were nigh impossible.
This is different. The big stick is finally being wielded. Drinks manufacturers have been scrambling to reformulate their sweet and fizzy drinks to cut the sugar levels and avoid the levy. Tesco has been one of the most successful, bringing 85% of its own-brand soft drinks below the 5g level. Britvic claims to have done even better, with 94% of its drinks, including Robinson’s Refresh’d, Purdey’s and Tango, now low enough in sugar to be exempt. That drops to 72% if you include the PepsiCo portfolio, for which it is the supplier in Great Britain and Ireland. PepsiMax has no sugar, but original Pepsi is unchanged.
So is original Coca-Cola, a so-called “heritage brand” that accounts for 14% of UK sugary fizzy drinks retail sales, according to market research provider Euromonitor, with Pepsi trailing some distance behind. Each original Coke can will defiantly continue to contain more than nine teaspoons of sugar. If you want less, choose Coke Zero Sugar, the company says. So the price of Coke original will go up, but not as much as it might have, because the bottles will shrink from 1.75 litres to 1.5 litres. The price increase passed on by the company is just 20p. “People love the taste … and have told us not to change,” a spokesman said.
Coca-Cola is a massive global brand, its bottles to be found in every African village and even the odd Mexican church, substituting for communion wine. Tinkering with the sacred formula may have been a step too far for its international executives. But there is also the sobering example of what happened with Irn-Bru.
In Scotland, where Irn-Bru is considered a national treasure, an online petition demanded manufacturer AG Barr drop its plans to more than halve the sugar content from 10.3g to 4.7g of sugar per 100ml. “Hands off our Irn-Bru,” it declared. In January, fans were said to be stockpiling cans and bottles of the original in the hope they could ride out the winds of change.
Lucozade also hit major problems. Cutting the sugar and adding sweeteners caused a big dip in sales of the energy drink. The Grocer trade magazine reported a decline of 8.4% in a year.
The bleak truth is that reformulation isn’t easy or even sometimes satisfactory. Swapping sugar for artificial sweeteners changes the taste of a soft drink. And when it comes to cakes, biscuits and desserts, it gets really complicated, because sugar is not just a sweetener – it helps raise cakes, give texture to pastries and stabilise ice-cream.
Leatherhead Food Research has been helping food and drinks companies trying to pick their way through the minefield. It lends not only its scientific and technical expertise on how to make a low-sugar biscuit, but the services of its sensory panel. This is a group of people, not unlike wine tasters, who are selected for the sensitivity of their tastebuds and their ability to describe what is going on when something melts in the mouth. That biscuit can be “crumbly”, “cloying”, “crunchy”, “burnt”, “uncooked”, “sweet” or “salt”. They will assess the “overall aroma intensity” as well as the “hardness on first bite”.
Kathy Groves, the head of microscopy, says there is no way she could be on the panel herself. “Someone like me is hopeless. I’m terrible. For me, it’s sweet or maybe a bit bitter. I can’t describe it. But these are people who really can distinguish differences in small flavour notes or different textures and so on.”
The ideal way to reduce sugar in food might be what was done with salt – stealth reformulation, a gradual reduction over years, so that nobody noticed. But, as the industry’s Food and Drink Federation (FDF) complains, that’s not a runner because PHE wants results within the first year. “We lost the argument even though [the campaign groups] accept on salt it was a better way to do it,” say Tim Rycroft, the corporate affairs director.
There are two types of artificial sweetener, Groves explains: bulk sweeteners, used in large quantities in food, and intense sweeteners, used in small amounts. The latter include aspartame, which is around 200 times as sweet as sucrose (sugar); saccharin, which is 300 to 500 times as sweet, and stevia, newer and plant-based, which is 200 to 300 times as sweet. The record is held by a new sweetener on the block, derived in part from aspartame, called advantame, which is thought to be 37,000 times sweeter than sugar. They all have different flavour profiles – Groves says that some have a hint of liquorice to them, for instance. The sugar hit may be faster with some than others.
But it’s tricky to substitute these in drinks and keep the flavour. “I personally prefer diet drinks now,” says Groves, “but there’s no doubt they taste different from the sugary version.” And the other issue is the anxiety that many people feel about artificial sweeteners.
According to Cancer Research UK: “Large studies looking at people have now provided strong evidence that artificial sweeteners are safe for humans.” But that doesn’t reassure everybody. As NHS Choices acknowledges, aspartame, for one, has been “extremely controversial” in spite of investigations giving it a clean bill of health, including one of half a million people by the US National Cancer Institute and another by the European Food Safety Authority. The only issue found was for people with a rare genetic disorder called phenylketonuria (PKU), who are unable to metabolise aspartame, leading it to accumulate at harmful levels.
The bulk sweeteners are called polyols and they are derivatives of sugar. There are regulations around their use, including the requirement that any product containing more than 10% needs to be labelled “excessive consumption may produce laxative effects” – not an attractive thought.
In cakes and biscuits, “the sugar is a physical presence”, says Groves. “It has a huge influence on the colour, the crunchiness, the flavour, the way it breaks down while you are eating it, the texture, the rise in the oven. The whole basis of the product is altered when you reduce the sugar.” Changing the recipe using bulk sweeteners and other ingredients such as more fat means that low-sugar cakes and biscuits may not be low in calories, which somewhat defeats the object.
Nestlé appears to be trying to avoid sweeteners. The Wowsomes are made with “restructured sugar”, the company says, made by spraying sugar, milk and water into warm air, which dries it into an amorphous form, full of holes under the microscope. Like candy floss, the sugar is supposed to melt on the tongue, giving a sweeter taste in the mouth. With KitKat, it has changed the recipe to cut sugar but add more milk and cocoa. Other companies have just cut the portion size. Toblerone has been criticised for spacing out its triangular pieces. It is not just about the rising price of ingredients, the reason given by the company in response to complaints.. PHE suggested smaller size portions were also an acceptable way of cutting sugar.
The FDF says that companies are willing to cooperate, but they don’t like being under pressure to deliver results in just a year and they are worried about the imminent report from Public Health England. “They are waiting quite anxiously for the sugar reduction report,” says Rycroft. “We know it will be loads and loads of data. But what will be the tone? Clearly it will be a mixed picture and not altogether brilliant. Some may need to go faster.”
He hopes PHE will say the voluntary approach is working and they should stick with it. But, “if it is to do with naming and shaming and lack of progress and insufficient engagement, it undermines [the companies’ efforts]”.
Cutting 20% of sugar is a challenging goal, he says. “Companies are really trying to do this stuff. By all means judge us at the end of the four years, but don’t start 12 months in saying it is a failure or a success.”
But in a way, PHE is just pushing the industry further down a road it needs to travel. There has been so much publicity about the evils of sugar and unhealthy foods that people are already voting with their wallets. Emma Gubisch, the head of insight at Leatherhead, says their recent research shows that 44% of consumers are trying to eat less sugar.
Euromonitor supports that. Sales of sugary drinks have been falling rapidly. Coca-Cola’s in the UK “have been declining by double digits over the last five years”, according to research analyst Florence Schmit, “suffering from a general trend in the industry towards lower-sugar variants in carbonates and soft drinks overall”.
Add to this the health and wellness trend, “zooming bottled water sales, with myriad functional water launches, which are set to grow by a whopping 50% over the next five years” and the writing seems to be on the wall for sugary drinks, and foods as well. But persuading us we want to buy the new low-sugar versions of our old favourites is going to be a struggle.
