Hello @PotentialCustomer, welcome to our forum!
Thank you for sharing your concerns with us. We appreciate your feedback and want to address your questions and thoughts.
Before addressing your specific concerns, it’s important to clarify our approach to ingredient safety. We prioritize scientific research and assessments conducted by health authorities to ensure the safety of our products. We remain vigilant in staying updated with the latest findings and await evaluations from authoritative bodies such as the EFSA (European Food Safety Authority). While scientific literature may raise more questions than the ones they want to answer in the first place, it’s crucial to rely on comprehensive analyses, such as meta-analyses, which draw from hundreds of studies to establish conclusive correlations or effects. As of now, there is no meta-analysis indicating that sucralose is unhealthy.
Now, moving on to your specific concerns about sweeteners, it’s worth noting our broader approach to ingredient safety. We understand the importance of scrutinizing scientific studies in assessing the safety of ingredients. Often, single scientific publications may present findings that appear alarming. However, it’s essential to consider the broader body of evidence. For instance, similar concerns have been raised about ingredients like soy, oats, sunflower oil, flaxseeds, you name it. Yet, extensive research over many decades has shown these ingredients to be safe and even beneficial for health. Therefore, while we remain vigilant and responsive to emerging research, we also encourage our customers to consider the totality of evidence before drawing conclusions about ingredient safety.
Addressing your specific questions:
Flavours are composed of two main aspects: taste and aroma. While flavouring preparations add aroma to our Plenny Shake, they do not contribute to taste directly. Instead, they enhance the scent, which is perceived through the nose. Taste, on the other hand, is experienced on the tongue and includes sensations like sweet, salty, bitter, etc. To achieve the desired flavour, we add a sweetener. Without sweetness, flavours will lack depth and richness. We opt for sucralose to keep the sugar content low while maintaining the desired flavour profile. We want to keep the sugar content low and to get the same sweetness that we currently have we would need to add several grams of sugar vs the 20 milligrams of sucralose we are approximately adding to our Plenny Shakes. Our aim is to provide a mildly sweet taste, distinct from competitors who may use higher sweetness levels. For you to have an idea, weighing 20mg of sucralose is extremely difficult with a scale. So customers would be forced to add sugar or more sweetener than what we are adding at the moment. This would add another level of difficulty to preparing a simple meal and we wouldn’t be able to guarantee consistency in the flavour.
Previously, we offered the Plenny Shake Active Neutral, allowing customers to adjust sweetness and flavour. However, due to low popularity, we discontinued this option. Through customer surveys, we’ve found that the majority are comfortable with sucralose in our products. While we continue to explore natural sweeteners, challenges such as availability, flavour compatibility, and cost make it difficult to find alternatives that meet our standards while keeping our products affordable. Feedback from samples consistently favours our current formula containing sucralose. This doesn’t mean that we will stop trying to go for an alternative. We are aware of this type of feedback, we appreciate it and it pushes us to keep on searching for an alternative that allows us to keep the same quality.
We hope this explanation addresses your concerns. If you have further questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to reach out.