Nestlé Creates First Chocolate Bar Using ‘Restructured’ Sugar

Everyone, even your ma, will tell you how bad sugar is. “Mary from work says it gave her nephew cancer,” she explains to you one evening over the phone, “and your uncle Dan lost four stone just by giving up Freddos!” News articles warn us to avoid the white stuff and even your beloved Irn-Bru has been forced to reduce its sugar content.

Nestlé, however, claims to have come up with an innovative solution to our sugar problem. In a nutritional first, the food and drinks company has found a way to “restructure” sugar, so that less of it is required to achieve the same sweet taste. As the Guardian reports, Nestlé is using this restructured sugar in a new range of chocolate bars.

The sugar, which is being developed in Nestlé’s factory in the North West of England, is made by spraying milk, water, and sugar into the air and drying the substances. In a statement given to the newspaper, Nestlé explained that “the milk stabilises the spray-dried sugar and stops it becoming too sticky,” resulting in a sugar that dissolves quicker.

Nestlé’s new line of chocolate bars, named Milkybar Wowsomes, are now on sale in supermarkets and contain 30 percent less sugar compared to the regular Milkybars.

While Public Health England told the Guardian that Nestlé should “be applauded” for its efforts at sugar reduction, Linia Patel, spokesperson for the Association of UK Dietitians, isn’t so sure. She told MUNCHIES, “The key thing is we're still not really changing people's behaviour, because we're still encouraging them to be eating lots of chocolate bars.”

She continued: “I think for people eating a lot of chocolate bars or a lot of high sugar snacks, this might the first step … but the next step we need to start doing is actually looking at behaviour change, and getting to people to opt for foods that are more nutrient-dense.”

Patel did, however, concede that you had to “applaud [Nestlé] for being innovative, and not going down the sweetener route.”

Nestlé’s attempt to reconstruct sugar comes after the UK Government’s sugar tax on fizzy drinks and a campaign from Public Health England earlier this month to “reduce overall sugar across a range of products” by at least 20 percent by 2020.

Time to listen to your ma and say goodbye to those fizzy laces.