Omega Ingredients launches monk fruit juice concentrate

 21 September 2010 – Omega Ingredients, the UK manufacturer of flavours, fragrances and ingredients for commercial use, has launched a juice concentrate of Luo han guo (known as “Monk Fruit”).

Steve Pearce, managing director of Omega Ingredients, says, "Juice Concentrate of Monk Fruit is going to become a very useful flavour enhancement ingredient in cereal, chocolate and savoury foods applications. Its intense sweetening properties make Monk Fruit a natural alternative to mainstream sweeteners, such as aspartame, saccharine and sugar.”

This juice concentrate can be used and declared as a fruit juice. It has good synergistic properties when used with other sweeteners (eg. a slow taste onset of the sweetness effect followed by a long tail off), with the overall effect of reducing a product’s sugar levels and making the ingredients more attractive to health conscious consumers. It also masks the bitterness and aftertaste of other ingredients including preservatives.

The juice concentrate is extracted from the small melon-like fruit, which grows mainly in South China and has been used for centuries in traditional Chinese herbal medicine as a key ingredient for treating sore throats and coughs.