Sodium reduction: Natural cheese remains a big challenge

Next up was a chat with technical services leader, salt, Dr Janice Johnson, and product line manager Jackie Van Norden on sodium reduction.

While there are lots of products on the market enabling modest reductions in sodium, most solutions promising serious reductions still rely on potassium chloride (KCl), they explained.

The challenge with KCl is that it doesn’t have the same taste profile as salt, which imparts flavor gradually, but instead provides an intense salty spike that rapidly tails off, leaving a slightly metallic aftertaste.

It also lacks the flavor enhancement properties of salt, which brings out the flavors and aromas of other ingredients in a recipe, they added.  

However, Cargill has managed to address some of these challenges with its Flake Select technology, which takes KCl, salt, or combinations of both, along with natural ingredients to mask the bitterness of KCl, and homogenizes them into flakes that have a bigger surface area to volume ratio and so deliver a more intense, salty taste with less sodium.

The compacted flake also means you get greater solubility, low bulk density and superior adherence for topical applications (they ‘sticks’ to chips and snacks), they added.

So what are the biggest challenges in the sodium reduction field?

Manufacturers have made progress across the board, they added, but achieving significant reductions in natural cheese remains a challenge, in part because of regulatory constraints (standards of identity).

For example, Cheddar cheese made with potassium chloride as a partial substitute for sodium chloride might have to be named ‘Cheddar cheese product’.  

Meanwhile, if fat is removed from cheese, the water content typically increases, which in turn requires extra salt in order to retain a fixed ratio of salt to moisture, an important factor in maintaining cheese texture.