US biotech company Manus has launched its new Monk Fruit Sweetener, showcasing the ingredient at this year's IFT FIRST show, taking place in Chicago this week.
The product is the first monk fruit sweetener to be produced in the US at commercial scale through industrial biomanufacturing.
Previously, the ingredient has been grown only in a single region of southern China and has been subject to harvest cycles, price swings and quality variation.
Manus said that this had concentrated what it sees as a fast-growing sweetener in one country, leaving brands dependent on a single harvest and a single supply chain.
Thus, the firm is offering a fully independent, US-based supply route with consistent quality, predictable pricing and proximity to end markets, which it says will deliver "real diversification and optionality beyond a single-country, agricultural model."
Additionally, as the product will be produced by fermentation rather than agriculture, it will also carry a far smaller environmental footprint: normalised to equivalent sweetness, lifecycle analysis indicates Manus' Monk Fruit Sweetener uses roughly 6.7 per cent of the land and water that cane sugar requires.
"For decades, the world’s monk fruit has come only from China, leaving the category dependent on a single harvest and a single supply chain,” said Ajikumar Parayil, founder and CEO of Manus.
"We have changed that. By producing it in America, at commercial scale, we give the food industry a second source it can rely on – and we turn monk fruit from a niche, premium ingredient into a practical workhorse for sugar reduction."
It is the latest breakthrough from a proven technology and scale-up platform for bioalternatives, reinventing how the world’s most valuable molecules are made, across sweeteners, flavours and the building blocks of essential medicines.
Manus describes the new ingredient as a "zero-calorie, non-glycemic sweetener," adding that it is around 350 times sweeter than sugar. The product also boasts an optimised mogroside profile that delivers clean, rounded sweetness and no bitter aftertaste.
The sweetener's solubility and stability make it suitable for applications in ready-to-drink beverages, dairy and plant-based alternatives, baked goods and confectionery, as well as functional and nutritional products and food service.
Plus, as it is biomanufactured rather than harvested, every batch of the monk fruit sweetener has full traceability and consistent purity.
The ingredient has successfully completed FEMA GRAS review (FEMA No. 5108), with an FDA GRAS Notification for broader use in food and beverage products in progress.
"Producing a molecule as complex as mogroside V through fermentation requires more than 30 enzymatic steps within a single cell and we have successfully engineered and scaled that process," said Christine Santos, Chief Technology Officer of Manus.
Using a fully water-based, solvent-free purification process, we have achieved an optimised mogroside profile that gives a clean, highly soluble sweetener with no bitter aftertaste.
"The result is an ingredient that is chemically identical to the mogrosides found in nature with the performance, consistency, scalability and supply reliability that food and beverage manufacturers require."
Manus said that it is currently supplying samples for formulation, with broader commercial availability to follow.
