Interview: ‘Stevia has evolved, now to convince the consumer’

At BrauBeviale 2018, Döhler’s senior product manager B2C for non-alcoholic beverages, Sarah Dorschner, talked FoodBev’s Alex Clere through some of the concepts that the company was exhibiting at its stand – all of them designed to highlight the ways in which it can work with its customers to formulate sugar out of beverages.

The concepts included a reduced-sugar black tea with yuzu, a maple-sweetened juice, and a low-sugar raspberry soda that retains the mouthfeel of full-sugar beverages.

Dorschner says that the biggest challenge for Döhler is helping its customers to reduce calories and sugar content through reformulation, while still retaining taste.

She says that, after years of threatening to break through, now could be the time that stevia comes to the fore.

“We see that products came to the market when we didn’t have good qualities [in stevia] yet,” Dorschner says. “That’s what was really difficult for consumers because they connected stevia with a bad taste, but we see that the market has evolved; we’ve found solutions that are much better and higher in quality, and now we have to convince the consumer.

“We also see that stevia isn’t labelled on the products anymore in a prominent way, but that it’s rather integrated without any declarations so that consumers don’t even recognise it. But since we have much better qualities, it’s a really good way of integrating a sweet component from a natural source.”

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Presented and edited by: Alex Clere