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Comment by sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

My guess is artificial sweetener, which by technicalities gets to say it's safer than it really is because of number-rounding laws. Or something?

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FTA: "The company, which makes Kitkat and Aero, says its researchers have found a way to structure sugar differently, so that it uses 40% less."

Seems like they re-invented something like Splenda?

The difference here (if true) is that they say it doesn't affect taste - I've never had an artificial sugar than tastes anything like sugar.

And it has gotten worse lately. Many manufactures are doing half sugar and half artificial sweetener. And they never label it as such leading me to take a sip and promptly throw the rest away.

The sugar alcohols (like xylitol/erythritol/sorbitol/whatever-tol) are pretty darn close. Their problem is not so much taste as gastrointestinal upset though.

It should be noted that erythritol is not known for causing gastrointestinal issues. I don't really understand why we even use xylitol or sorbitol.

Yup, it's so superior that it seems ludicrous that others are considered comparable. The taste of it isn't quite like sugar, but it's close, and it's WAY better than any of the non-polyalcohol-sugar artificial sweeteners... and, IMO, is better tasting than isomalt, which comes second in tastiness to me, sorbitol 3rd place... I don't much like xylitol.

I've found xylitol tastes close enough to sugar, compared to all other sweeteners I've tried.

It does appear to get "dissolved" faster though, I can't really explain.

Xylitol is a sugar alcohol and not an artificial sweetener.

While it is technically a natural sugar alcohol, and can be refined from birch trees, most of the xylitol used in food products now is full synthetic or fermented with yeasts.

It is sweet. It is artificial (sometimes).

It may also draw additional water into your colon and have a "cool" mouth-feel, and it does add calories. Erythritol may be preferable for those reasons, even though it is less sweet. A common non-sugar sweetener mix is erythritol and stevia, which can, when proportioned correctly, add the same sweetness as an equal mass of refined sucrose.

xylitol is actually beneficial for your teeth. I really welcome a future of kit-kat bars made with xylitol, if its at all reasonable.

It's also a laxative, so be careful how much you consume.

Splenda is a totally different chemical compound, though, with a chlorine atom. The article makes it sound like it's still sugar but with a different physical arrangement of molecules.

Could it be air? Like, they physically structured the sugar granules to have tiny air pockets inside them? It doesn't necessarily have to be restructured at the molecular level...

The sugar in chocolate is dissolved, right? So there aren't any granules in the final product. They already mix air into most cheap chocolate-like candy products.

No, not fully dissolved. The sugar grain size is what determines smooth vs gritty mouth feel. There are micrographs on the harvard wiki, and in my video, linked from another comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13087023

There are porous aggregate sugar grains already in use. It's not that they're full of air, just smaller than usual particles (so they dissolve faster) roughly clumped into normal sized agglomerations.

Thanks! Should have known there was more to it than I realized, interesting.

This is the most plausible hypothesis I've heard since it's already been done with ice cream, and people actually enjoy and prefer the experience of it(despite the obvious downside of getting less Stuff).

One possibility is "instant sugar... now in chocolate!" discussed below. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13087023

They can't really use artificial sweeteners to add bulk because those are much much sweeter than sugar per unit mass.

Balance the artificial sweeter with some sawdust to achieve the same mass and sweetness. Pretty sure that's legal...

I think the idea is that they can now remove 40% of the sugar and still achieve the same sweetness with no other sweeteners needed.

I guess I'm more cynical and skeptical of businesses which only have financial incentives in mind to do "good" things like this, but no ethical incentives.

What is an ethical incentive?

Nothing that Nestle is familar with.

If they remove 40% of the sugar they have to replace it with 40% of something else. Candy is sold by weight.

Removing the sugar only solves part of the problem

They don't have to replace it with anything if they don't want to. They could just make it smaller, sell it at a higher price (per weight).

Hershey has already done this quite a few times with their chocolate bars. They just get thinner and the texture gets waxier, I assume for structural integrity.

I'm shocked that this is the only mention of wax in the entire thread.

Last Hershey bar I tasted reminded me of those old novelty wax lips they used to give kids around Halloween. It's already to the point where you can actually taste the wax if you know the flavor.

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