The Quest for a Natural Sugar Substitute

Photo illustration by Reinhard Hunger and Sarah Illenberger

On a Sunday evening last September, stevia became famous. In the final episode of "Breaking Bad," an image of the sweetener filled the TV screen. Lydia emptied the packet into her mug of camomile tea, not knowing that Walt, her former partner, had poisoned it. "How are you feeling?" he later asked. "Kind of under the weather, like you've got the flu? That would be the ricin I gave you. I slipped it into that stevia crap that you're always putting in your tea."

Kevin Miyazaki/Redux, for The New York Times

The Plant Science Greenhouses at Michigan State University.

In an interview with The Guardian, published the next day, the actress who played Lydia laughed about the product anti-placement: "Sorry, stevia," she said. "Oh, I suppose it feels a bit rubbish. Do you think anyone actually bought it anyway?"

Actually, yes. The natural, noncaloric sweetener, made from the leaves of a Paraguayan shrub, now sits in second place in the $400 million market for sugar-bowl sachets. (Sucralose hangs on at No. 1.) When Cargill introduced the leading brand of stevia, called Truvia, in 2008, the company heralded it as "a new category of sweet." Sure enough, imitators followed. A few weeks later, Merisant put out PureVia — made from the same ingredient — and then the manufacturer of Sweet'N Low started filling light green packets with what it called Stevia in the Raw.

That was five years ago, yet most of us have few associations with the product. Splenda, Equal, Sweet'N Low: These are household names. Stevia's still an arriviste, the oddball at the coffee bar.

But the battle for the sugar-substitute market is not about packets on the table; the real money is in being the go-to additive for diet foods, especially diet drinks. When the F.D.A. approved a chemical called cyclamate in 1951, a brand-new industry emerged: No-Cal soda, Diet Rite and all the other sugar-free refreshments. Cyclamate was banned in 1969 for promoting bladder cancer in rats, but aspartame later took its place. In 1983, Coca-Cola put aspartame-based NutraSweet in Diet Coke, and sales soared. "The rule of thumb is that 60 percent of all high-potency sweetener sales is in beverages," says John Fry, a food scientist and 40-year industry veteran who consults on sweeteners for Cargill. "You have to be in soft drinks, one way or another."

As badly as stevia needs the soft-drink companies, the soft-drink companies may need stevia even more. While sweetened carbonated beverages still make up around one-fifth of all the liquids we consume, the volume sold has dropped, per capita, every year since 1998. We're more afraid of sugar than we've ever been. What yesterday were seen as "empty calories" have today been designated "toxic." Doctors warn that cans of soda put fat into your liver, weaken your response to insulin and increase your risk of heart disease and diabetes. The panic over sugar has grown so pervasive that other dietary boogeymen — salt and fat and gluten — seem like harmless flunkies in comparison. (In 2012, when the market-research firm Mintel asked consumers which ingredients or foods they were trying to avoid, sugar and added sugar topped the list, by a wide margin.)

The soda companies have tried to tack into the headwind: In 2010, PepsiCo promised to reduce the sugar in its products by 25 percent, and the following year Coca-Cola told the British government that it would cut the calories in soda. But consumers are not content to switch to artificial sweeteners. Sales volume of diet soda fell by 12 percent in the last six years. Far from serving as a life raft for the industry, that business is leaking dollars, too.

The problem is that for all the fear of fructose, consumers have grown just as wary of its beaker-born alternatives. To health fanatics, they seem noxious on their face: Sweet'N Low comes from a derivative of coal; Equal is made from methanol and converts to formaldehyde when digested; Splenda is a chlorinated sugar. Others worry over well-worn rumors of their ill effects — tumors, headaches and depression. More recent studies hint that diet drinks can cause the very problem they're meant to solve and make us fat instead of thin. (Lab rats fed with noncaloric sweeteners sometimes start to overeat, as if the ersatz sugar primed their rodent tongues for other sweets.)

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