Sweet proteins are emerging as a promising solution for sugar reduction, but unlike traditional sweeteners and sugar, these precision fermentation-derived proteins are exponentially sweeter – with some between 1,000 to 5,000 times sweeter – often playing a supportive role in a formulation rather than a primary sweetener.
Companies like Oobli, Amai Proteins and MycoTechnology program microorganisms, such as yeast, to produce proteins originally found in rare fruits and fungi, enabling consistent, scalable supply. From there, how the companies approach supply and formulation begin to diverge.
Oobli focuses on building a multi-sweet protein platform, Amai Proteins uses AI-driven computational design to improve protein performance and MycoTechnology emphasizes how sweet proteins function within broader flavor systems.
The state of fermentation and cultivated ingredients: Where are we now?
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Scaling remains a central challenge, but the industry sees progress
Like many biotech-derived ingredients, scaling sweet proteins into the mainstream use still hinges on several core challenges: supply, cost and performance stability in formulations.
Sweet proteins have the potential to reach mass scale, but confidence in supply and economics is essential, according to Amy Chen, Oobli’s president and chief commercial officer.
“Brands need to know the ingredient delivers a great consumer experience, works reliably in manufacturing, and can be sourced at the scale their business requires,” Chen said.
Stability, which was once a major barrier, has largely been addressed through protein design, according to Amir Guttman, CEO, Amai Proteins.
Now, “the biggest challenge is taste optimization within specific applications,” as interactions between the protein and other ingredients vary widely across food matrices.
Cost, meanwhile, “is largely a scale issue,” with the expectation that it will improve significantly as production volumes increase, Guttman said.
Designing sweet systems
The three companies also differ by how they design and deploy sweetness.
Amai Proteins is focused on molecular-level optimization using “AI-based computational protein design to make very small changes in their structure,” according to manufacturing conditions without impacting function in finished products, the company said. By “slightly rearranging the amino acids,” it enhances “sweetness, stability, and application performance” without introducing new building blocks.
Oobli, by contrast, combines multiple sweet proteins, like brazzein, thaumatin, monellin and miraculin “allowing us to tune the sweetness profile with far greater precision than any single-ingredient solution could offer,” Chen said.
MycoTechnology’s systems-oriented approach looks at how sweet proteins interact with other ingredients in a formulation.
“Sweet proteins tend to have a lasting sweetness, which can function to mitigate some back-end off notes, including bitterness,” said Karli Van Simaeys, product manager at MycoTechnology.
Sweet proteins can enhance and extend “flavors including fruity, sweet aromatic and mint” as sweet modulators, Van Simaeys added.
From supportive role to sugar replacement?
Today, sweet proteins are most commonly used alongside other sweeteners rather than as a complete replacement for sugar.
Chen describes a dual role for the proteins, which “can be used to fully replace sugar or to serve as a powerful complement to existing sweetener systems,” noting that Oobli is already enabling “70% to 90%” sugar reduction in some applications.
MycoTechnology similarly sees them as part of a toolkit rather than a standalone solution. “We see sweet proteins being part of a larger sugar reduction toolkit,” Van Simaeys said, noting that their “slight delay in the onset of sweetness” often makes blending necessary to achieve a sugar-like taste profile. In practice, they work well alongside caloric sweeteners, rare sugars and stevia, she added.
While Amai Proteins does not “expect one universal ‘best’ sweet protein,” Guttman predicts “a combination of best-in-class sweet proteins and application-specific blends.”
Looking ahead, however, all three point to the possibility of a more complete replacement, if scale and cost barriers continue to fall.
Guttman emphasizes the economic potential where sweet proteins are very close to cost parity with sugar and expects costs to even be lower than sugar when scale is achieved.
Chen, meanwhile, sees a longer-term shift where “protein-sweetened products” could reshape the industry by delivering “amazing taste and a fraction of the sugar.”
As sweet protein production scales and technologies mature, the line between supportive ingredient and primary sweetener may begin to blur.
A platform-driven future for sweetness
Across all three companies, a consistent answer emerges where sweet proteins are not a single-product solution, but a platform-driven category.
“The future belongs to platforms rather than individual molecules,” Guttman added.
