Salt is essential in the kitchen chemistry of baking bread. It coaxes the sweetness out of biscuits and enhances the flavours of savoury crackers – yet the majority of consumers are trying to avoid it.
With a compromise between health and flavour clearly in demand, global ingredients and food solutions provider Tate & Lyle has created a new salt-reduction ingredient that enables food manufacturers to lower the salt content of their products without sacrificing taste or shelf life.
The new product, SODA-LO Salt Microspheres, is a salt-reducing ingredient that the company says tastes, labels and functions like salt – because it is salt.
According to Tony Hawkes, Tate & Lyle 's business manager, although SODA-LO Salt Microspheres has a clean salty taste, it reduces salt levels by 25 to 50 per cent in many types of products including baked goods, breading and coatings, and salty snacks.
SODA-LO is created using a recently patented technology that turns standard salt crystals into free-flowing crystalline microspheres. According to Hawkes, these smaller, lower-density crystals deliver their salty taste by maximising surface area relative to volume.
Because SODA-LO is made from salt, it has doesn’t have the bitter after-taste or off-flavours associated with some other salt compounds or substitutes, he says.
A global concern
Salt reduction is not just a passing fad. Research shows just how concerned consumers and health organisations are about the levels of salt in the western diet.
In 2006, the National Health and Medical Research Council recommended an upper safe level of intake for sodium of 2300mg per day for those aged 14 years and above. In 2009, Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) said the average Australian consumption of sodium was 2150mg per day.
Though consumers are responding, 75 per cent still say that taste is the most important factor when choosing foods. Studies have shown that consumers associate products labelled as low-sodium as having inferior taste. Salt therefore remains critical to enhancing the flavour of foods.
“The challenge with salt has always been that consumers really notice when it’s not there,” says Tate & Lyle’s director of health and wellness innovation, Andy Hoffman. “That’s what drove us to really look at using salt itself and keeping that flavour constant while using less.”
Tate & Lyle testing shows that consumers perceive parity tastes between products made with regular salt and foods containing SODA-LO. According Tate & Lyle’s senior product manager savoury, Jacques Masset, this could be the first step towards breaking the link in people’s minds that a low-salt product is a bland one.
David Lewis, director of health and wellness product management at Tate & Lyle, notes that salt is also a staple in food production – not just because of taste, but function as well. “It acts as a preservative and texturising aid, for example,” Lewis says.
International recognition
SODA-LO Salt Microspheres was recognised as the heart health and circulatory innovation of the year and most innovative health ingredient of the year from the NuW Excellence Awards announced at the Health Ingredients Europe conference last November.
Chairman of judges, Peter Wennstrom, said: “Tate & Lyle’s SODA-LO Salt Microspheres addressed a major global health problem where there was no solution. This very innovative product provides immediate applications in dry formats, for instance; nuts, chips and French fries, and could well potentially be a game changer in salt.”
According to Tate & Lyle, SODA-LO has been tested and shown to work well in a wide variety of foods including baked goods, breading and coatings, salty snacks and seasonings, and it naturally resists caking even in hot, humid environments.
Many of its international customers
have been successfully using SODA-LO for over a year in bread, pizza
dough, pizza sauce and seasoning blends. The company is continuing
its work to assess its suitability in a number of other products like
sauces, dressings, cheeses and meats.
