Dutch startup nears US licensing deal for a lower-calorie rare sugar

Fooditive is negotiating with a large sweetener supplier to bring 5-KDF, a rare sugar made from fruit residue, to the US while it awaits an FDA reply.

Fooditive, a Rotterdam-based foodtech startup, says it is in advanced talks with a large ingredients supplier already active in sweeteners to commercialize 5-keto-D-fructose (5-KDF) in the US. The partner is unnamed and no deal is final. The company plans to license or co-develop rather than build factories, possibly with two or three US manufacturers covering different applications. Bakery ingredients firm Puratos has made a strategic investment after testing the sweetener in baked goods.

5-KDF is a rare sugar found in trace amounts in wine, vinegar and honey. Fooditive makes it by enzymatic bioconversion of fructose, using a non-GMO Gluconobacter oxydans strain isolated from beer. The bacteria are removed during purification. The fructose comes from apple and pear pomace and other fruit-processing side streams. The company ran production for almost three months in a 75-cubic-meter system at a contract manufacturer in Italy and believes it can scale to 200 cubic meters.

The company says 5-KDF has 1.4 calories per gram against 4 for sugar and is about 70% as sweet, though perceived sweetness can be higher depending on the recipe. It also says the sweetener browns like sugar, holds up in acidic drinks and avoids the digestive issues linked to polyols. If those claims hold, food makers get another way to cut sugar calories, made from waste streams rather than dedicated crops. That could widen access to lower-sugar food over time.

Watch for the FDA's response to the GRAS notice, filed in January 2026 after a self-affirmed GRAS determination in 2024. Also watch whether 5-KDF gets the added-sugars labeling exclusion that allulose and tagatose have under specified conditions. That is not established. The calorie, sweetness and cost claims come from Fooditive and are not independently verified. The source did not support claims about diabetes risk or lower food costs.

Source: AgFunder News