What is Allulose?

When we were just starting, we had a simple goal: to make a delicious cereal that would be good for a carb-conscious diet and use only simple, high-quality ingredients. We’ve always been huge fans of tasty cereals, and we sincerely believe that adults and children deserve healthy cereals that taste great and aren’t drowning in added sugars. So we embarked on a journey to formulate a cereal that tastes just like you remember but makes you feel better—a guilt-free, health-focused, undeniably delicious cereal.

But how do you make a sweet cereal that isn’t chock full of sugar, especially when so many artificial sweeteners taste worse and still have negative health impacts? One ingredient, known as allulose, unlocked a world of possibility. To understand why we settled on allulose sweetener, it’s important to know what exactly sugar is and how it behaves in the body.

What Exactly Is Sugar?

You might be surprised to learn that “sugar” doesn’t describe just one ingredient. Instead, it refers more generally to a class of compounds that all behave (and taste) similarly. Sugars are naturally occurring carbohydrates that taste sweet and easily dissolve in water. There are two classes of sugars: monosaccharides and disaccharides. Monosaccharides, also known as simple sugars, are made from a single type of saccharide–most commonly found in food as glucose and fructose (as in “high-fructose corn syrup”). On the other hand, disaccharides, or complex sugars, are a bonding of two monosaccharides. These include lactose (the sugar found in milk) and sucrose.

These carbohydrates are energy dense, and when eaten, they produce high amounts of calories relative to the amount ingested. That’s one of the reasons they taste so good! Our bodies know that sugars provide necessary calories in a neat little package, and the good flavor encourages us to eat more to survive. But our contemporary access to high amounts of sugar has always made this adaptive trait a bit of a double-edged sword.

Since excessive sugar intake can alter a person’s mood, change their metabolism, and lead to tooth decay, we believe in watching our sugar intake and limiting the amount of carbohydrates we consume daily.

So where does our star ingredient, allulose, come into the picture? Well, you may have noticed that its name looks similar to all those different types of sugar. Glucose, fructose, sucrose, lactose, and allulose carry the -ose prefix commonly used to identify a compound as a saccharide. Allulose is, in fact, a sugar, but it’s different from other sweeteners. It is, essentially, a partial monosaccharide derived from fructose but with only a fraction of the calories. Not surprisingly, based on its provenance, it tastes much like other sugars and is approximately 70% as sweet as sucrose–the sweetest of the sugars.

Despite being first identified in nature as early as the 1940s, allulose hasn’t been well understood or researched, and it wasn’t until the last few years that the FDA approved the compound for use in food. As a naturally occurring sugar innately low in calories and deliciously sweet, allulose seemed like the perfect sweetener to tie together our carb-conscious, wholesome cereal recipes. We think you’ll agree!

Allulose has allowed us to formulate almost a dozen wonderful-tasting, healthy cereal recipes without compromising flavor, health, and ingredient quality. And that’s not even counting our other products like cereal bars! Using allulose as our primary sweetener, we’re on the cutting edge of flavor development and excited to see what else we can come up with.