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
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Eran 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 a carrier — a fiber or mineral — it mimics the way a drug might work to reach a certain part of the body.
Unlike artificial sweeteners that try (and often fail) to replicate sugar’s delicate taste, DouxMatok takes a radically different approach: It reduces sugar by 40% without compromising texture or taste. The startup’s technology modifies how sugar molecules interact with taste receptors to enhance the experience of sweetness. By loading sugar onto a carrier — a fiber or mineral — it mimics the way a drug might work to reach a certain part of the body. Normally, when you bite into something sweet, most of the sugar never sees your taste buds — 80% of it goes directly to the digestive system. DouxMatok’s reengineered sugar allows for better delivery of the sweet flavor to land on taste receptors, thereby eliminating the need for more added sugar.
