It’s been a great week for sugar on FoodBev. Two US soda companies going back to their roots with ‘real’ sugar as their chosen sweetener, plus a report that sweet drinks help to reduce stress at work and make people less likely to be aggressive or argumentative.
So you could argue that the future is sweet for sugar. Or could you? What about the new kid on the block? A spoonful of sugar feature about 15 calories while Stevia has none and follows through with no carbs and a glycemic index of ‘0’. On top of that it’s an astonishing 300 times sweeter than sugar.
Sugar is expensive and there’s no cutting corners. If you want the sweetness of a spoonful then you need to add exactly that. You just don’t need as much of high intensity alternatives such as stevia or saccharin, aspartame, sucralose, neotame or Ace-K to appeal to consumer’s desire for sweetness. So there’s a really good reason for manufacturers not going down the sugar route that matters even more to them than watching consumers’ waistlines.
But the retro thing, the provenance thing? Well, leaving the calories issue aside for another debate, to my mind if sugar is more expensive but is 100% natural and reminds consumers of happier times then make ‘real sugar’ drinks super-premium. If it’s what consumers want then they’ll willingly pay a little more.
The industry offers a range of drinks from ‘original’ to low or zero calorie. Why not price them accordingly? If your desire is for natural and ‘original’ then you’ll pay that bit more. If you’re on a budget or calorie conscious then there’s a price incentive with the choice. OK, the higher priced versions might sell less but that should be covered by the higher price, making the decision to premiumise sugar drinks less of a bitter pill to swallow.
Let’s see how it goes for Big Red and Dr Pepper with their retro sugar offerings. Do they really have to be for ‘a limited period only’? I think that sugar is here to stay as an ‘alternative sweetener’. What do you think?
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