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The Mad Scientists Who Engineered Healthier Sugar That Actually Tastes Good

It’s only taken this startup 60 years — and it’s tackling salt next

Rina Raphael
Marker
Published in
9 min readMar 2, 2020

EEran Baniel’s face is as full of wisdom as his pockets are of candy. The 74-year-old, with close-cropped silver hair and short silver beard, drags treats with him everywhere he goes — Barbie-sized bottles of hazelnut spread, bite-size biscuits, wrapped little chocolates. It’s as if someone cast Sean Connery as Willy Wonka.

Inside the lab of Baniel’s startup, DouxMatok, headquartered a half hour from Tel Aviv, Israel, food scientists in white coats labor over sweets like wounded war patients. Baniel pushes a plate of two seemingly identical vanilla cookies my way. As I take a bite of one, he intensely studies my reaction, wondering if my palate can detect their molecular differences. This is one of his favorite party tricks: seeing if strangers can distinguish his product — a hacked form of sugar — from a household-name snack.

The cookies taste, well, exactly like normal cookies, and that’s his point. While they’re made with sugar, they need far less than usual because they use a new type of sugar developed by DouxMatok. (The name — half French, half Hebrew — means “double sweet.”) You only need half as much.

By loading sugar onto…

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Marker
Marker

Published in Marker

Marker was a publication from Medium about the intersection of business, economics, and culture. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Rina Raphael
Rina Raphael

Written by Rina Raphael

Journalist :: health, wellness, tech / Well To Do wellness industry newsletter at welltodo.substack.com

Responses (4)

What are your thoughts?

How to get rid of chronic fatigue? CBD gummies! I often meet this question on forums of this type and I want to say that for me this problem turned out to be easily solved with the help of a small amount of gummies that I eat regularly. I think that…

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So, a guy invented a new filler ingredient? 🙄

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Why not just use monk fruit powder (called Lo Han Guo by Chinese)? It’s much sweeter than sugar so no recipe requires much (I make good hot chocolate with it), and it doesn’t spike blood sugar or fuel pathogens. It’s non- caloric, too.

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