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(Slide 1) Some of the headlines we see are things like “NASA Space Shuttle,” “Gasoline Prices Increase,” “Inflation Worries Worldwide,” “Ozone Depletion Becomes an Environmental Issue,” “Earthquakes Kill Thousands,” “The World Celebrates a Winter Olympics” and “Bakers Contemplate the Switch of Sweeteners.” Sound familiar? Well, it is not 2010, it is actually 1976. The space shuttle Enterprise was just unveiled, and the Space Shuttle Program was just beginning. Ozone depletion was just becoming the new catch phrase. (That day, I am not quite sure where Al Gore was. I think he was roommate with somebody at Harvard, maybe.) The price of gasoline, 59 cents. (Let’s wish for those days to come back.) The winter Olympics, not in Canada, anybody know? Innsbruck, Austria. So a lot of things are the same; a lot of things kind of change. And food manufacturers were switching from sucrose to high-fructose corn syrup.

Now back in 1976, my father was a full-time high school science teacher, and he was a part-time wheat farmer in Kansas, so I come by my experience in the baking industry from a very early age. Like a lot of dads, my dad had a couple of what I call “dadisms,” things your fathers tell you all the time. One thing he used to constantly say is, “Everything old is new again,” and I think this works for this circumstance. He also used to say, “What goes around comes around” — another one that I think is going to be appropriate.

So let me just see — it is a little hard to see out in the crowd — let me see a quick show of hands: Who was working in bakeries in the 1970s? Put those hands up. Keep those hands up just a minute. Take a look around. Just see who was working in bakeries in the 1970s.

So the proposition to switch sweeteners is not going to be news to a lot of you out there, and if you were not holding your hand up, I hope you saw somebody around you who was because those are the guys I want you to ask the questions of after my presentation, not me, because they are the guys with the real experience out there and can help to shed a little light on what some of the issues might be as we look to change

from one sweetener type to another. So that ends the audience participation part. You can all relax now and enjoy that Chicago lunch.

I am also thinking that the theme seems appropriate this year, especially the first part of it, the “Harvesting the Past” part. When we talk about this, you should go back to some things that we thought about in the past.

A Case Study on HFCS

By Brian Strouts

Brian Strouts has been with AIB International for 19 years. He is currently the head of research and technical services and contributing editor for the AIB International Technical Bulletins. Brian has a Bachelor’s of Science degree from Kansas State University, majoring in bakery science and management, and has completed the Certified Baker Program at the American Institute of Baking and the Cookie and Cracker Technology Course from the Biscuit and Cracker Manufacturers’ Association.

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Last year after the meeting, I went to the ASB Technical Committee and said, “If you guys have a topic that is of interest to you and to the bakers that are going to be at the meeting next year, give it to us at ASB.” We have a research group that does nothing but work on research projects on our own and under contract, and I said, give me a topic and we’ll do some research for you and I will present it here at the meeting in 2010. So Terry Bartsch called me last fall and said, “You know what? We would like to take you up on that offer.” It makes me think of something else my dad used to say, “Be careful what you ask for.” So I said, “Okay, Terry, what do you want us to talk about?” He said, “How about high-fructose corn syrup replacement?” I said, “Really! How about something a little less controversial like potassium bromate or acrylamide development maybe.”

No, Terry decided that he really wanted to talk about high-fructose corn syrup replacement so we decided to hold true on our offer. It has been interesting the response I have received from many people when I tell them what I am going to talk about. It is kind of a range of two things: one is, “O-oh,” and the other one is, well, it is hard to write down, but it goes like this: “Whew. O-oh.”

I am going to do the best I can here over about the next 20 to 25 minutes to present the research that we did on this particular topic. What I hope to tell you, or give you some pointers on anyhow, is if you are contemplating making that change in sweeteners, and again specifically we are talking about the issues of replacing high-fructose corn syrup with granulated sugar or sucrose, then there some things that maybe you want to think about. Then, the next presenter after me is going to tell you a little more about why you want to be even thinking about replacement of sweeteners.

We are going to start off with a little chemistry lesson here just so we are all on the same foot. My dad would be very proud, that one year, my junior year in high school, has not gone to a total waste. I am going to use some chemistry here.

(Slide 2) When we are talking about sucrose, what exactly is it? Well, think generically of granulated sugar; that is going to be best frame of reference for me to start from. Granulated sugar is sourced from cane sugar or sugar beets, and it does not really matter

which source it comes from because, chemically, we are talking about the same material: cane sugar, beet sugar, chemically they are still the same. From a performance standpoint, all things being equal, they are also going to be the same. And which one you are going to use in an operation is largely going to be a function of which one is closer, from a refining standpoint, to where you want to use it because that is going to reduce the distribution cost and make it a better product for you to use.

Whichever source we are starting from — sugar cane or sugar beet — it goes through a number of difference processes, multiple steps, from centrifuging to filtration to decolorization, evaporation, ultimately to get to some form of crystallization so you have got that granulated sugar that we are talking about.

During that process nearly all of the impurities are removed. Some of them go off to some other by-products like molasses, but the end result is a final product that is about 99.8% pure sucrose.

Most people are going to use it in a dry form as a particle, although it is also available as a liquid and a number of different particle sizes, so there are a lot of opportunities there that you might select just based off of that. But the key point really to remember about sucrose as we start this discussion about interchanging sweetener selection is the fact that sucrose is a disaccharide. That means it is composed of one molecule of glucose linked to another molecule of fructose. If I had a big chalkboard up here, I could write the chemical expression C12H22O11 to help demonstrate exactly what those linked molecules contain.

Sucrose is very soluble in water. That is a key component of what we are looking for when you look at the functionality of sucrose as compared with some other sweeteners. And it is also because of that solubility, sucrose is going to have a dramatic effect on things like boiling point and freezing point of the solute that it is held in, and that is a key concept of any sweetener but something to consider as we start to compare them a little bit later on. But also, of course, sucrose contributes things like color, flavor, texture, flavor development, so there are a lot of things to think about when it comes to sucrose.

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A Case Study on HFCSThe next logical step is: (Slide 3) What is corn syrup? Where sucrose is going to start from sugar cane or sugar beet, corn syrup is going to start from cornstarch extracted out of corn. The process starts by going through a hydrolysis step, using some combination of acids and enzymes to break bonds. The process results in free glucose molecules and varying lengths of glucose polymers. But again, the thing here to consider is that we are talking about all glucose.

By controlling that hydrolysis process, you can get a number of different attributes in the syrup. You control the length of those glucose chains, and you distinguish how the resulting different corn syrups function differently from one another by assigning a dextrose equivalent (DE) number. The DE describes how many or how long those chains are in that particular product. The DE can be anywhere from 20 to 73 and, depending upon the DE, the product starts to act more like a starch or more like a sweetener. The DE of a syrup affects attributes such as sweetness, viscosity and also water absorption or thickening.

I apologize if I am going through this, which is probably information that you already know, but it puts us all on the same basic standpoint. You need to understand some of the key differences so we can talk about what happens at the application step.

(Slide 4) High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contains both glucose and fructose. So what happens is, the corn syrup goes through an additional step that converts some of the glucose into fructose. Rather than assigning a dextrose equivalence number to such syrups, we are more concerned with the percentage of fructose in the blend versus the glucose. We start to see things like HFCS 42, HFCS 55 and HFCS 90, in other words the number represents the percent of fructose in the syrup, with the remainder being the glucose fraction. Now, there is really nothing unusual about that 42% fructose content as a percentage of the sweetener. That level is very commonly found in a lot of other natural products if we want to think that. Fruits, vegetables, honey — all are very similar in fructose makeup. There are actually even other sweeteners out there that have much higher fructose content than what high-fructose corn syrup does. For example, agave syrup, I think, is almost 80% fructose. There are a lot of different things out there to which you could compare HFCS.

(Slide 5) Now we need to consider some basic things about sweetener functionality. They are all very soluble, easily dissolved in water. The other thing that is significant is their hygroscopic nature: their ability to take up water, hold onto water, even draw water in that starts to change the characteristics of that product, which becomes more plastic by tying up the water. A syrup could be thought of as a stabilizer, and one of the more significant things is it holds onto that sugar crystal that might be there so that it is less likely to recrystallize. A key point right there: controlling recrystallization.

A sweetener syrup is also going to have effect on texture. It is going to have an effect on, as I said, the boiling point and the freezing point. That is going to affect how it interacts with conditions like starch gelatinization. There is going to be an effect on shelf life because, as the water gets locked up in those very small molecules, the water activity (aw) changes to a point that the water does not move around, either within components in that product or between the environment around it.

When talking about something like a fermented product, breads, sugars have the function of feeding the yeast. Without some type of sugar present, you are not going to fuel the yeast, and you are not going to see proper fermentation. Actually, during fermentation when you start out with pure sucrose, the sugar is going to almost immediately hydrolyze into glucose and fructose factions because of the invertase enzyme present from the yeast. Thus, the reduction into glucose and fructose is happening as part of the natural process.

Like any other aspect of sweeteners that I have talked about already, any sweetener is going to affect flavor, color and aroma, and if we are looking at a pure sweetness level, HFCS 55 is almost an exact match from a sweetness standpoint to granulated sugar.

It is really those functional differences that we are going to be focusing on here, so that is starting to get me to the point of where we are heading down this road. When I talked with Terry, I said that we would design an approach where we can take kind of a broad shotgun look at a number of different products under some limited parameters and try to report on what you see from a functional difference when you start to switch those sweeteners around. The project was understandably small and concise. But as Rich said, when you start throwing a lot of variables at things,

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pretty soon you have got 16 years’ worth of work lined up for you. (Slide 6) So short of doing 16 years’ worth of work or hiring a post-doc from K-State to do this, we limited our approach on what we were going to look at and started with three mainstream items: white pan bread and hamburger bun formulation, yellow layer cake and a chocolate chip cookie. We also limited what we were using to just one high-fructose corn syrup source and replacing the sucrose that was in formulations with high-fructose corn syrup, or vice versa, depending on what place we were starting from, and just doing it on a solids basis and changing very little else.

(Slide 7) To try to document those changes, we looked at a lot of different points: things like water absorption, mixing time, mixing procedure, proofing time — and the height that we got at proofing was going to be critical in the fermented items. We looked at baked product volume as a finished product quality attribute, appearance, crust color, internal structure and eating quality. All these are pretty mainstream and should be things that you recognize in your own testing or even daily quality evaluations. (Slide 8) As much as possible, we tried to rely on objective tools that we could use to measure some of those things. We used things like a texture analyzer, Minolta color meter, Brookfield viscometer, rape-seed Volumeter and some other devices to try to document as closely as possible the effect of the sweetener changes. We also had some subjectivity in there.

We have trained scientists to do this research for us, but we always tried to balance out both the subjective things that we saw with some good objective measures.

(Slide 9) The other thing we used is an imaging machine, a device that we have developed at ASE. It is simple to operate. There is a drawer you open up, you put a slice of bread in, and you close the drawer. The device uses a series of cameras and different light settings to look at that product, in this case a slice of bread, to put an objective measure on things such as cell size, grain, texture, cell wall thickness, uniformity. You are going to see some images like this as we start to go through this presentation. Again, we were trying to get as objective as possible. Okay, that gets us right to what we saw when we started switching out between sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup in these different products.

Our basic sponge-and-dough white pan bread formulation uses either 7% sucrose (bakers percent, or flour weight basis) or 9.7% high-fructose corn syrup (bakers percent, or flour weight basis). The difference is based on the solids content. Then we further adjusted the total moisture in that system. In our particular case, we kept it constant at 61% water absorption. Truly, the only thing that was different at this point was the selection of sweetener to start to go through comparisons. There really was not a lot of difference in this particular application, and again that probably does not come as a huge surprise to anybody who did this the other way back in the 1970s or who has gone through that change already for themselves. (Slide 10) Both formulations showed gluten development during the mixing time that we used as part of our standard, and both were proofed to the same target heights at the same relative amount of time in our particular case. We are looking for 58 minutes, and all of the variables that we ran were +/- one minute of that. We also measured loaf volume, and based on the pan size that we used, we were looking for about 2,500 cu cm, and we were within 25 cu cm. It was about as accurate as you can be, when using the Volumeter to measure low volume items. Things looked very much the same. We even compared the subjective scores that we go through using our trained technologist, measuring break-and-shred, symmetry, crust color and external characteristics, and things scored out exactly the same.

(Slide 11) We took a look on the inside, and that is a little frightening. If you have never seen a slice of your bread 10 ft high, maybe you ought to do that sometime. It looks a whole different way there. But we took a look at the internal characteristics to see if we could find any real differences there. Again, these are labeled between granulated sugar (sucrose) and high-fructose corn syrup, and again we did not really see any big difference. Honestly, we scored both of these down for being a little bit on the open side, but they were comparatively equal, and that is the real key. When you start to go through this type of testing, you want to make sure that you are only changing one variable at a time so that you can identify any of those difference that are truly showing up because of the one thing that you changed.

(Slide 12) This is an image capture from the Ace machine, and no, we did not make toast although we could have. This is actually through a lighting setup where we backlight the slice through an opaque panel,

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which really helps to distinguish the cells better and, particularly, the cell wall thickness. This just happens to be a different lighting configuration. You can start to see, maybe at the bottom, how the image capture shows some of the various things that we are actually measuring: cell size, distribution and the number of the cells within certain size ranges, as well as the standard deviation of some of those same measurements. It captures a number of images going across that slice of bread so you can compare what the center looks like versus the edges, top to bottom, or however you want to work the data.

(Slide 13) One thing that we found helpful in setting up this piece of equipment is to actually view the data in a histogram form. This starts to show the cell size and the number of cells that fall within a particular cell-size range. Down on the left-hand side of the histogram is the smallest cell size that we could measure and the bar going up is how many cells within that slice were within that size range. We are looking for results to be skewed heavily to the left, meaning that we have got a product with fine cells, uniformly distributed, as most people would prefer for their bread.

Again, this is just from one of the slices. When we looked at the comparative measures between the sucrose version and the high-fructose version, there was really not a lot of differences that we could start to pull up, but we looked at them nonetheless. (Slide 14) We even took measurements such as density, which is actually the standard deviation of the densities, comparing sucrose (the blue bar) to high-fructose (the red bar). You can see from those couple of graphs that not much difference was present.

All this testing was also done with replication, so we ran the tests more than once. All the measurements were done on multiple loaves of bread, layer cakes or whatever we were using for a particular application. These really are average results of those things going across. So, the net effect of changing sweeteners in the bread is really not too big a difference. (Slide 15) We also looked at crust color, as I indicated, because one of the things that I heard coming up through the K-State Baking Science program and for some time in industry was the difference in color that you get between different sweeteners, with a common description of foxy red color being attributed usually to sucrose. So we were looking to see any real difference in crust

color development because of the sweeteners we were using. Again, there were no real big differences. These were done with the color meter such that the higher the number, the lighter the color. We do have crust color and crumb color on the same graph so do not get confused by that, but if you just compare the two blue bars (sucrose) and compare the two red bars (HFCS), again not a lot of difference occurred, certainly not a significant difference from what we saw.

(Slide 16) We also did hamburger buns. We compared sucrose to high-fructose there. We were running higher levels of sweeteners in buns. We thought, okay, well, maybe at the level of sweetener used in normal bread dough going through a fermentation system, you reduce the sweetener to an extent that nullifies any real difference. But what if you were using a higher level of sweeteners as in hamburger buns? Comparatively, the formulations were 12% using sucrose and 16.6% on high-fructose, again balancing out for the solids content and keeping the water absorption constant just like we did for loaf bread.

We conducted the same objective and subjective measurements, looked at dough characteristics in the sponge, dough characteristics on the dough side, handling, proof time, all those same things, and again basically came out with a net wash just like we did on loaf bread. (Slide 17) We looked at density and cell size again using the Ace equipment to generate very similar pictures, with the only difference being we cannot effectively backlight the crown or heel of a hamburger bun. We had to use some different measurements on those particular ones. But again, there was not a lot of difference between the two things. We did note that they were both slightly open, but again comparatively the same. (Slide 18) We took one more look at crust color to see if we could see something there, and again really no real differences emerged between the two formulations.

So, now we are thinking, wow, maybe this thing is not so controversial after all. It is just a big switch. Anybody could switch sweetener styles in and out, and it will not be any problem. Then we came to yellow layer cakes. (Slide 19) This showed to be a little more dependent upon the type of sweetener being used in the different applications.

A Case Study on HFCS

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High-ratio cakes were running about 120% sugar solids in this particular formulation. We balanced out for total moisture content and tried to leave everything else the same, but in the control formulation using high-fructose corn syrup, the sweetener was actually a 50:50 blend. In our experience, it is a little more common for people who use HFCS in cakes still to use about half sucrose with half high-fructose corn syrup and also to acidify the system to some extent. So, our control formula used some tartaric acid to acidify a system that is half sucrose and half high-fructose corn syrup versus the one that is all sucrose.

(Slide 20) We looked at the cake’s internal characteristics, scored it like we did the bread, and we noticed a little more difference on the internal structure in that the high-fructose product seemed to be slightly more open. Where we saw an even greater difference, though, was in the surface characteristics as we compared the two of them, with the sucrose cakes being a little more dull, having less shine to them. This aspect is really probably better illustrated in this particular picture where we split the cakes in half and put them side by side. (Slide 21) There is definitely something happening here with the high-fructose bringing a benefit that we are not really quite seeing with the sucrose. Maybe the better way to think about it would be that something is happening in the sucrose cake, and what that is, is being affected by the amount of sugar in there. Undissolved sugar crystals are being deposited on the surface, which tends to give you a more dull appearance. Avoiding sugar recrystallization is definitely going to be a benefit on the high-fructose side.

We also did some measurements with color, and as much as we tried to keep this as simple as possible, sometimes it just wasn’t in the cards to really answer the questions quite the way that we wanted to. So, in addition to running the all-sucrose and the 50:50 blends with acidification, we also ran some batters that were unacidified. We also ran some that used 100% high-fructose corn syrup.

(Slide 22) This is where we really started to see some differences falling out on both crumb color and crust color. And in all honesty, the objective measures that we did on crumb color aren’t really supported by the data that we could measure with the instrumentation. What we saw was that even use of the 50:50 blend of sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup tended to give a

darker crumb color and some differences in crust color as well, but the differences were much more apparent in the crumb when we were looking at it, so again there definitely is a difference in sweetener interactions in yellow layer cakes.

(Slide 23) We also looked at specific volume, and the picture becomes a little clearer here as well. We had higher cake volume with the sucrose as compared with any of the partial replacements with the high-fructose corn syrup. Now, part of that is probably explained by the fact that the mechanical action of mixing is going to trap air along those sugar crystals, then pull those air cells into the cake batter and disburse them. Without that crystal, you are probably not getting quite the same mechanical cutting action. (Slide 24) You can again see that demonstrated in the batter itself as we look at specific gravity. A much higher specific gravity means a denser batter because fewer air bubbles are trapped in the product than was so with all high-fructose corn syrup. And that is one of the things that you have to think about when you look at changing between sweeteners is not only the formulation but also what you need to adjust in the mechanical part of your process. Maybe by changing mixing time or mixing speeds, we could recover some of these attributes.

(Slide 25) The last application we looked at was a chocolate chip cookie, and it is pretty straightforward. The control was a soft, chewy cookie, which already had some syrup in it. Also, both the sucrose and HFCS formulations contained some brown sugar, so both of them had some granulated sugar. When we took the formulation to full high-fructose corn syrup, as compared with full sucrose replacement, we again definitely started to see some differences. You can begin to see the effect of surface recrystallization with the sucrose cookie.

Cakes and cookies are very similar products in that they are both chemically leavened, both high sugar and both high fat. The difference is really how much moisture is present. Once you get to a cookie like this, you have got a super-saturated solution when you are trying to run sucrose in it, and you can definitely start to see problems with recrystallization over time. These problems are going to affect both the color and appearance, as we can see here, and will also have a pretty dramatic effect on the shelf life.

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(Slide 26) To answer the question of shelf life, we repeated the chocolate-chip cookie dough by making it, as we do quite often, without the chips. While this makes the product a little hard to name — “chocolate-chip-less cookie” does not sound quite right — but that is essentially what it is. This procedure makes it a little easier to look at the product and to run analyticals to see any differences. The difference made by sweetener choice in the effect on spread, or diameter, of the cookie starts to show up just a little bit more. Again, at the same sugar solids level, we see a little less spread in the high-fructose formulation and a little more spread in the sucrose formulation as a comparison. And then we also really wanted to try to answer that softness issue because that a primary attribute of sugar in a cookie formulation is its effect on shelf life. We ran some break tests, using a three-point bending rig on the texture analyzer that mimics the action of taking a cookie in your hand and pushing your thumb between your two fingers to break that cookie in half. (Slide 27) The results were a little bit surprising, but I think they really demonstrate the difference in the two sweeteners here. On Day No. 1, the day after baking, when we measured the force required to bend that cookie in half, it actually took more force to bend the high-fructose formulation. A lot of that what this test is actually measuring is breaking force. By Day No. 3, however, the trend had completely reversed, and the high-fructose corn syrup cookie was actually what you might be able to call softer as the two were measured; there was definitely an effect on shelf life as we measured it in this particular product.

(Slide 28) That is a lot of data, very quick presented, with a lot of setup to it, but if I was going to summarize our research, I would say in pan bread and hamburger bun applications, on a solids basis, we could find no real functional differences between the sucrose and HFCS formulations. In cakes, there was much more of a difference on volume, crumb color and attributes such as batter viscosity, which would start to affect flow in some things; so definitely some things would need to be adjusted if you were trying to make that switch from one sweetener to another. The same thing held true with cookies: some very definite attribute differences occurred when changing sweeteners on a one-for-one basis. You would probably need to come back and make some further adjustments to really be able to maintain the same quality of finished product with one sweetener versus the other.

(Slide 29) In conclusion I would just like to say thank you to the ASB Program Committee. We did enjoy doing this project, although we had a little hesitation at first, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. I would like to thank the research staff at AIB listed here with whom we brainstormed about what we could do and should do. But the bulk of the work really came down to Theresa Sutton, Renee Beckman and Carmen Scott, so I appreciate their assistance in doing that. Thank you very much.

A Case Study on HFCS

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