New Sugar Substitutes Found in Citrus Could Be Sweet Deal for Food and Beverage Industry

By UF/IFAS News|September 19, 2022

Researchers at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) have made a breakthrough — discovering new, natural sweeteners/sugar substitutes in citrus for the first time. This finding opens opportunities for the food industry to produce food and beverages with lower sugar content and lower calories while maintaining sweetness and taste using natural products.

Yu Wang, Associate Professor of food science at UF/IFAS, managed the multi-year project that found eight new sweetener or sweetness-enhancing compounds in 11 citrus cultivars.

“We were able to identify a natural source for an artificial sweetener, oxime V, that had never been identified from any natural source previously,” Wang says. “This creates expanded opportunities for citrus growers and for breeding cultivars to be selected to obtain high yields of sweetener compounds.”

Selections from the UF/IFAS citrus breeding program were selected for unique and exceptional flavors. These cultivars included UF 914 (a grapefruit hybrid), as well as EV-2 and OLL-20 (both sweet oranges). Mandarins, including ‘Sugar Belle,’ ‘Bingo’, 13-51, 18A-4-46, 18A-9-39, 18A-10-38, also were included in the research project.

Wang’s research, which was recently published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, could lead to increased opportunities for the food industry to produce food and beverages with lower sugar content and calories while maintaining sweetness and taste using natural products.