06/06/07 Natural Sweetness

Natural Sweetness. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Humans love sweets. But as we all know an excess of sweets can be quite detrimental leading to things like tooth decay and obesity. But for years a completely natural sweetener has been available in places like Japan & Brazil. It's a plant called stevia and believe it or not is sweeter than sugar and has zero calories, zero carbohydrates and a zero glycemic index. Ann Tucker is in media relations with the Cargill Company who along with Coca Cola are developing this new sweetener. TUCKER: Stevia is basically an herb. It's grown all over the world and it has it's origins in Paraguay. Many people have known about it's sweetness properties for years but in the stevia family, which is related closely to the chrysanthemum family there are between a hundred and two-hundred different plant types so all stevia isn't the same. Coca Cola and Cargill have been working together to standardize a stevia product. TUCKER: Everyone was kind of looking for the same thing, what is out there in the world that's a natural sweetener that is zero calories and is great tasting. It takes kind of companies of this size and scale to be able to do that work. So how did they come together? We all came together around the same time around the same premise saying that if we combined our talents and skills we could get to the end result quicker. That end result is a product called Rebiana that Coke plans to use in one of their drinks in the near future. Tucker says it was important to have a product like Rebiana. TUCKER: If you know anything about plants, when you have 200 varieties of something that have been catalogued, each variety does different things or tastes a little bit different so you are trying to get to a consistent or standardized plant so that you can understand it each and every time. Cargill has been working with farmers all over the world to develop standardized stevia production. Tucker says that the stevia production is expected to increase. TUCKER: We're putting long term programs in place. Because it's a grown product we don't expect nor would it be the right thing to do for a market to kind of multiply over night. This has to be done properly with thought and care for everyone's benefit so the growth is going to be incremental until there's an acceptance and enough supply to answer the demand but people have been looking for an all natural, zero calorie sweetener and that's what this is, it's the first in it's category. Tomorrow we talk with Ann Tucker about how stevia will be used. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.