The botanical alternatives for sweet taste

At a glance

Botanicals can provide a natural alternative for food and nutraceutical manufacturers looking for a sweet taste.
Mulberry, liquorice and vanilla are all interesting options.
Natural Origins offers an innovative solution with its Taste Giving Extracts, natural extracts that capture the full flavour profile of the botanical.
These are available in powder or liquid versions (ethanolic and 0.0), suitable for all markets and all types of formulations.

Associated with the notion of pleasure, sweetness appeals to all palates. However, the use of sugar in the food industry is increasingly criticised for its impact on health. In this article, we present a healthy alternative that adds natural sweetness via botanicals: our Taste Giving Extracts or TGEs. Using these innovative formulas derived, for example, from liquorice root, mulberry leaves or vanilla, discover here how our Natural Origins ingredients can enhance your products with a sweet, natural flavour without the drawbacks of sugar.

The sweet taste potential of botanicals, a natural alternative for the food and nutraceutical industries

Why replace traditional sugar with botanical alternatives?

In order to give consumers a taste of the much sought-after sugar, various carbohydrates, including sucrose, have been extensively used in foods, certain food supplements and above all drinks. But these free sugars disrupt carbohydrate and lipid metabolism, cause oxidative stress and have toxic impacts, particularly on the liver. Numerous studies have shown a link between sugar consumption and the risk of developing certain pathologies such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases (1). What's more, adding white sugar to preparations slightly distorts the authentic flavour of botanicals.

Add sweetness with mulberry, liquorice and vanilla to food, drinks and food supplements

The botanical world offers a multitude of options for obtaining a sweet note with no harmful impact on the metabolism, while still providing pleasant taste sensations. The sweetness of botanicals, which consumers appreciate for both their taste and their naturalness, are appealing for their health benefits, combining deliciousness with a sense of innocuousness.

Combining well-being and pleasure, these botanical alternatives enable traditional sugar to be replaced while preserving the sweet sensation. This includes mulberry, liquorice and vanilla, three botanicals that give a unique flavour that is particularly appreciated by consumers.

The leaves of the Rubus Suavissimus mulberry are used for their sweetness. Mulberry leaves are recognised in traditional medicine for their ability to provide a light sweet flavour, as well as for their benefits on blood sugar levels. Mulberry can be combined with other botanicals or herbs to create a pleasant hot drink, such as an aromatic infusion. Mulberry leaves can also be used to make cold infusions, offering a slightly sweet and refreshing alternative on hot days.

mulberry leaves Natural Origins

Glycyrrhiza L. liquorice is renowned for the sweetness it leaves on the palate. Its name comes from the ancient Greek ‘glykys’ meaning sweet and ‘rhiza’ meaning root. It is distinguished by a compound contained in its rhizome, glycyrrhizin, whose main constituents, saponosides, are responsible for its sweet taste. As well as being delicious, liquorice has soothing properties that relieve sore throats and aid digestion, making it an excellent ingredient to add to your herbal teas and infusions. For example, liquorice can also be added to tea blends to make them even sweeter. This sweet-tasting botanical is often combined with mint, lemon or ginger. This provides an even richer flavour, while reducing the need for consumers to add sugar.

liquorice Natural Origins

Vanilla Planifolia Jacks ex Andrews beans are another way to enhance the perception of sweetness by incorporating an aroma consistent with this flavour. Indeed, one of the significant impacts of vanilla is that it enables you to reduce the proportion of sugar in your recipes and preparations, while giving them a specific flavour. Manufacturers formulate their drinks and food products using vanilla to reduce the amount of sugar (2). Using certain types of flavours, such as vanilla, to focus on their sweet taste is a solution adapted to the quest for products containing less sugar, such as yoghurts, cakes and other sweets.

vanilla Natural Origins

Mulberry, liquorice and vanilla are three ideal options for those who want to add a natural sweetness to their formulations. In addition to their delicious taste, these botanicals are also valuable health-promoting ingredients. Incorporating these three botanical ingredients into your products will ensure a tasty and pleasant experience.

Natural Origins flavouring solutions: Taste Giving Extracts

At Natural Origins, we are aware of and are concerned about the health of your consumers. Via our TGEs, based on our expertise in botanical extraction and flavouring, you can completely reduce the sugar content of your products by formulating their composition using a botanical ingredient that delivers a sweet taste. Following this trend means not having to choose between well-being and deliciousness, and enables you to offer an unrivalled natural and delicious taste experience.

TGEs (Taste Giving Extracts)

TGEs are natural extracts that capture the full aromatic profile of a botanical through a combination of hydro-distillation, hydro-alcoholic extraction and concentration processes. These botanical extracts are sourced from noble materials and reveal the authentic, emblematic flavour of each botanical from as little as 2g/L, so only a small dosage is required.

The key strenghts of our in-house process

After harvesting and drying our botanicals, we proceed to extracting via a water/ethanol mixture, followed by the successive concentration steps (recycling the recovered water and ethanol):

firstly liquid formulation,
then pasteurisation
and finally, for extracts in powder form, drying.

The flexibility and performance of our system enables us to extract either the entire aromatic fraction of the botanical or just its volatile fraction and essential oil. We preserve the aromatic profile of each botanical by isolating the significant fraction often eliminated and degraded by conventional extraction processes, and reincorporating it at the end of the process.

Our R&D team has dual expertise in extraction and flavouring, with an in-depth organoleptic vision of the raw material and the different fractions that need to be obtained in order to restore an optimal flavour profile.

Taste Giving Extracts applications of Natural Origins

There are many possible creations using our TGEs:

Food & drink

Smoothies, shots, juice, ready to drink
Powdered drinks to be reconstituted
Beers & Spirits
Carbonated drinks, flavoured waters
Chocolate, snacks, bars
Dairy products and botanical alternatives to milk (yoghurt, milk, ice cream)

Food supplements

Gels
Effervescent tablets
Gummies

At Natural Origins, we offer our natural extracts in both powder and liquid formats (ethanolic and 0.0) to give you the widest possible range of applications.
For example, a major French confectionery group has used our liquorice TGE to delight its consumers. A foreign leader in the food industry and an international expert in the design and manufacture of nutritional, functional and health products have chosen our Vanilla and Sweet Mulberry TGEs for their formulations.

Safe natural ingredients for healthy product formulations

As part of an environmentally-friendly approach, Natural Origins offers you clean-label ingredients, each bearing a particular flavour that contributes to a comforting and pleasant sweet taste. Our TGEs come from excellent sourcing and embody safety and naturalness. Our aromatic extracts come from supply chains that may be organic, guaranteeing total transparency from field to ingredient.

Their low level of processing enables them to retain all the organoleptic complexity of the raw material and the olfactory signature of each botanical. You can therefore safely opt for mulberry, liquorice or vanilla, which guarantee a healthy, natural composition and provide the sweetness of sugar without its drawbacks.

Below you'll find our TGE references, so you can easily explore the potential of botanical flavours, taking into account the health issues associated with the sweet world, without compromising pleasure and sweetness.


Sweet Blackberry Leaf PE TGE	Organic Liquorice Root PE TGE	Organic Liquorice Root Ethanolic Concentrated Extract TGE	Organic Vanilla Bean PE 0.3% Vanillin TGE