We met with the CTO responsible for Greater China and Korea, Mr Zhou; the Commercial Director, Mr Chang; Business Manager Mr Lu and Ms Qiu and Senoir Flavorist Ms Peng. We discussed about how to better help the tea drink and beverage industries to achieve “clean label” by using stevia. Currently the sugar reduction trend is inevitable and natural ingredients are gaining more attentions. However, taste is always the top preference of consumers.

Mr Zhou asked about the development of stevia industry, the product certifications and the application situations.

According to the questions, GL Stevia CEO Mr Wang introduced the history of stevia, planting model, our wishes, application pain points and the according solutions. The growing of stevia is restricted to sunshine, temperature difference and effective accumulated temperature. Different from other company’s business model, GL Stevia is mainly based on farmer planting+farmer contract cooperation. GL Stevia has spent years in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang and vertically integrated the cultivation, cutting seedling, planting, producing and application developing. The total planting area of stevia around China used to be high up to 20,000 HA with the lowest reaching 8,700 HA. Right now GL Stevia has self-owned planting base of 333 HA. Research on different stevia components showed that RD and RM have the best taste and is quite close to sucrose. However, due to the low content of RD and RM, the extracting work is often complicated and only through times of crystalization can people get a small amount of them. In order to solve the problem, GL Stevia independently cultivated GL#9 and GL#10 with better taste and higher RD, RM content. We’ve already applied for the related patent and started the commercialized production of RD and RM. How to apply the two “star” products in tea and beverages while in accordance with the raising sugar reduction consuming trend in China still remains a challenge.

The Senior Flavorist of Givaudan, Lily mentioned that many tea and beverage manufacturers would like to apply stevia in their products to help achieve health claim and clean label. However, food industry is a system that should take viscosity, solid content, texture and flavor into consideration. Selecting and application of sweetener higly depends on the specific food and beverage. The sugar reduction action in tea drinks is inevitable and the 0-calorie stevia syrup can consider the premix plan of RD and RM.

    

Finally, both sides agreed that the sugar reduction is an inevitable trend and cooperations is our common goal. The two companies should work together to find the way to make natural sweetener more popular among consumers by applying GL’s “star” products in food and beverages. GL Stevia would like to pay more efforts in stevia planting and provide more high quality stevia products to food and beverage industry as we believe that the pursuing of a better taste is endless.