Setting the stage: Is stevia ready for a sweeter second act?

When stevia first hit the scene seemingly ages ago (or, more accurately, in 2008), it felt like a dream come true: a nature-made high-intensity sugar alternative with an adventurous Amazonian backstory and an ability to best sucrose’s sweetness by a factor of 400-plus. What’s not to love?

A lot, as CPG brands and consumers soon found out. Despite making a quick splash in the sweetener space, early iterations of stevia-based solutions had sensory skeletons in their closets that threatened to stifle the sugar substitute’s change-making potential. And stevia is still getting fine-tuned as sweetener scientists draw on everything from transformative tech to better blending to preserve the properties we love while dialing down the drawbacks we don’t.

Conflicting needs

It’s about time, too, as demand for “feel-good” sugar alternatives has never been higher.

“First let’s recognize that sugar reduction remains a top priority,” Smaro Kokkinidou, principal food scientist at Cargill, said, with current-year Cargill research finding that 36% of consumers claim they try to avoid sugar.

“At the same time,” Kokkinidou continued, “consumers are keen to avoid artificial sweeteners. More than half — 56% — view ‘no artificial sweeteners’ as an extremely or very important statement on food and beverage labels, according to a 2024 HealthFocus International trend study.”

Sweet success

That battle between cutting sugar and avoiding anything artificial is just the sort of conflict that a “natural” sweetener like stevia seemed built to reconcile. And, indeed, stevia became indispensable in sugar-reduced formulations — and ubiquitous on supermarket shelves — as a result.

“We can confidently say it’s one of the most popular sugar substitutes around,” Tom Fuzer, vice president of market strategy at HOWTIAN, said. “It’s the most widely used natural sugar substitute across applications, with sports nutrition and alcoholic beverages the fastest-growing at the moment. And the latest Innova reports show more than 14,000 new products containing stevia launched over the last five years. Of all new products for sugar reduction globally, that amounts to an impressive 26.7% share for stevia.”

Growing pains

And yet the sweetener is far from perfect. As Fuzer recalled, stevia suffered from shortcomings in consistency, solubility, supply security and cost in use during its “teething” stage — all of which frustrated formulators.

But more disappointing for consumers was a taste profile that didn’t approach sugar’s as closely as formulators had hoped.

“One reason why stevia isn’t a silver bullet is its timing of sweetness onset,” Fuzer explained. “Sugar has an upfront sweetness that drops off fairly quickly, whereas stevia’s sweetness onset is more delayed, creating an impression of lingering sweetness.”

But sweetness isn’t all that lingers. “When stevia was first introduced,” Papao Saisnith, senior director of marketing and innovation, sweeteners, at Tate & Lyle, explained, “it faced challenges due to its lingering aftertaste” — frequently described as licorice-like and even cooling — “and due to its bitterness, which limited widespread consumer acceptance.”

Science of sweet

To figure out why this happens, it helps to understand some basic mechanics of taste.

Sugar — or, more specifically, the disaccharide sucrose — tastes sweet because it binds to sweet receptors in the mouth, T1R2 and T1R3. This binding launches signals that travel to the brain, where they deliver the message, “I’m sweet.”

Stevia’s active compounds aren’t disaccharides like sucrose; rather, they’re steviol glycosides, the most prominent of which are the rebaudiosides, but they do cling to our sweet receptors, and to T1R2 especially.

In fact, some rebaudiosides cling so tenaciously that they generate the “lingering sweetness” that Fuzer mentioned. As if that weren’t enough, rebaudiosides show binding affinity for two bitter taste receptors, too — TAS2R4 and TAS2R14 — hence the notorious bitterness Saisnith noted.

Bitter twist

But stevia’s rebaudiosides don’t interact with our taste receptors uniformly. The plant contains an alphabet soup of rebaudiosides ranging from A through F and now including I and M, and each differs in its chemical composition and structure. Those differences manifest in differing patterns and strengths of receptor binding.

Unfortunately, peculiarities in the binding properties of rebaudioside A, or reb A — stevia’s most prevalent, most stable and easiest rebaudioside to isolate — make it, arguably, the plant’s least palatable. But because it’s so prevalent, stable and easy to isolate, reb A came to dominate early-era stevia sweeteners.

The bitter upshot: Reb A’s late-onset, lingering sweetness and bitter, licorice aftereffects also came to dominate those sweeteners’ sensory profiles.

Breaking with tradition

As Casey McCormick, vice president of R&D at Sweegen, observed, “The market is still dominated by reb A due to two decades of marketing incumbency and lower cost.”

And yet this dominance persists despite the presence of better-tasting rebaudiosides, particularly rebs D and M, right alongside reb A in natural stevia extract.

The catch: “They exist at such low levels — less than 1% — that it’s simply not economically or commercially viable to produce a sweetener made from these sweet-tasting molecules using a traditional agronomic approach,” Kokkinidou said.

But some traditions were meant to be broken. Stay tuned for the next installment to find out how stevia innovators are chipping away at stevia’s “traditional” taste challenges with every tool in their kit.