Analysis of various sweeteners in petit suisse cheese: determination of the ideal and equivalent sweetness

Abstract

For a sweetener to successfully replace sucrose in food formulations, studies must first determine the necessary concentration of the sweetener to be used and its equivalent sweetness to sucrose. In this study,we verified both the equivalent sweetness and the magnitude of sweetness of processed cheese sweetened with different sweeteners and combinations of sweeteners.Atotal of four formulationswere evaluated: sucralose, sucralose/acesulfame-K (4:1), thaumatin/sucralose (2:1) and cyclamate/saccharin (1:1). First, the sweetness was determined using the ideal scale. Next, we determined the equivalent sweetness compared to sucrose (considered to be ideal in terms of sweetness) for each sweetener studied and evaluated its sweetness through the magnitude estimation method. The concentration of sucrose considered ideal in strawberry petit suisse was 17%. To promote a sweetness equivalent to the ideal (17% sucrose) sucralose, sucralose/acesulfame-K (4:1), thaumatin/ sucralose (2:1) and cyclamate/saccharin (1:1) sweeteners should be added to processed cheese at concentrations of 0.065%, 0.066%, 0.108% and 0.349%, respectively.