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Sweeteners are a diverse group of ingredients added to foods to enhance flavor and provide a desirable sweet taste. Sweeteners can also have functional roles in foods, such as providing structure, improving mouthfeel, developing browning in baked goods and supporting yeast fermentations when bread rises.

The most common sweeteners are the nutritive carbohydrates: sugars, corn sweeteners and honey. The U.S. is the world's largest consumer of natural sweeteners, consuming about 9 million tons of refined sugar, 12 mil. tons of corn sweeteners, and 170 thousand tons of honey per year. The FDA estimates we actually eat about 43 pounds per person, representing 11% of our total calories.

Over the past 40 years, non-nutritive, high-intensity sweeteners have appeared and developed a small, but growing market presence. Saccharin and cyclamate were first to market, followed by aspartame, acesulfame-K, Sucralose and Alitame. As regulatory hurdles were cleared and technical challenges were overcome, these sweeteners have become more popular as low calorie food ingredients. More will be developed, with higher sweetness intensity, to satisfy our craving for sweet products.

Some of these sweeteners can be difficult to dissolve with a conventional mixer. While sugar dissolves rapidly in hot coffee, it is much slower to dissolve in iced coffee or iced tea. A high shear Rotosolver^® can quickly disperse granular sugar to cut mixing time from 30 minutes to 10 minutes in cold water. This increases production capacity and reduces the number of tanks needed. Liquid sugar or corn syrups can be quickly and uniformly mixed with other liquids using an Admixer^™ in-line static mixer.

Aspartame has a low solubility in cold water, but is unstable in hot water or the acidified formulas sometimes used to increase solubility. Many beverage plants have increased their productivity using Admix Rotostat^® or Rotosolver^® high shear mixers for aspartame and caffeine.

If you need faster sweetener dispersion in cold liquids, or want to save on capital equipment while increasing productivity, contact Admix. We can work with you to meet your processing goals with our extensive experience in mixing difficult ingredients. We offer the most sanitary low speed and high speed top-entry mixers; in-line high shear or static mixers; and powder incorporation systems available, sized to fit your application.

Bring us your mixing challenges, and we will recommend creative solutions... Please call our applications engineers at 800-466-2369 or email us at mixing@admix.com.

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