PureCircle Trims 1.8 Trillion Calories From Global Diet

CHICAGOPureCircle has supplied enough stevia sweeteners since 2006 to enable the food and beverage industry to remove 1.8 trillion calories from global diets, according to the company's 2013 Calorie Footprint.

In our 2013 fiscal year, we supplied enough stevia to enable a reduction of 500 billion calories from global diets," said Ajay Chandran, director of corporate sustainability, PureCircle. Since we started monitoring in 2006, weve supplied enough stevia to help the industry achieve a reduction of approximately 2 trillion calories in food and beverage products."

The calorie footprint is an estimate of the number of calories that can be reduced within the global diet by modifying the caloric content of a product by replacing some caloric sweetness with zero-calorie plant-based stevia sweeteners. Since high-purity stevia sweeteners are metabolized by the human body in a way that has almost no caloric impact, a partial replacement of caloric sweeteners with stevia can have a significant caloric reduction benefit overall without losing a natural sweet taste.

"The pace at which were helping the food and beverage industry moderate calories is increasing at a significantly faster rate than we anticipated," Chandran said. "As a result, we now have the capability to help the food and beverage industry reduce up to2 trillion calories per year. This positions us well to achieve our cumulative calorie footprint reduction goal by 2020."

As part of PureCircles 2020 Sustainability Goals, the company aims to create a cumulative reduction of 13 trillion calories from food and beverages worldwide, with an interim goal of 4 trillion by 2015.

Global new product launches of stevia-sweetened food and beverages continue to grow with penetration across a wide swathe of categories. In 2013, 1,611 stevia sweetened foods and beverages were launched, according to Mintela 48% increase from 2012. In fact, stevia's value as an additive for use in food and beverage manufacture totaled $110 million in 2013, and is expected to reach $275 million by 2017.