Yesterday we brought you a story about a new type of all-purpose cleaner made almost entirely out of food waste. Today, we bring you another novel product being made from food waste: a sugar substitute. In the Netherlands, a company called Fooditive is turning leftovers from apples and pears, along with the pieces of fruit that are unfit for supermarkets, into a chemical-free sweetener.
Current sugar substitutes are considered a growing environmental hazard; artificial sweeteners such as sucralose and aspartame, found in Splenda and Equal, aren’t absorbed by our bodies nor are they completely removed by wastewater treatment plants, meaning these sweeteners end up in rivers and oceans, potentially harming aquatic plant and animal life. Then there’s regular cane sugar, which is not only fueling global health problems but also requires lots of natural resources like water to produce.
That’s why Fooditive’s product is so exciting. Instead of relying on raw materials, Fooditive takes third-grade apples and pears—those ones with brown spots or off colors, which wouldn’t be sold in a supermarket—from local Dutch farmers, along with some fruit scraps, and extracts the natural fructose through a fermentation process. The final result is a calorie-free sweetener without many of the concerns of both sugar and other sugar substitutes.
