NEWS OF TH E WEEK
HOW SWEET IT ISN’T FOOD INGREDIENTS: Low-cost imports force makers of widely used noncaloric sweeteners to cut back
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manufacturing artificial sugar substitutes is not the sweet business it once was. Aspartame maker NutraSweet says it will shutter its plant in Georgia, and sucralose maker Tate & Lyle is warning investors of significant profit erosion. By the end of the year, NutraSweet will close the plant in Augusta, Ga., which produces bulk aspartame and the precursor l-phenylalanine. About 210 people will lose their jobs. “Low-cost imports now dominate the aspartame market, making it impossible to sustain a profitable business,” says William L. DeFer, CEO of the privately held NutraSweet. The firm will continue to make the artificial sweeteners neotame and Twinsweet, a mixture of aspartame and acesulfame potassium. “Aspartame is a great product, but the competition, especially from China, is brutal,” says Grant E. DuBois, who once NEWSCOM
The artificial sweetener business is being buffeted by Chinese competition.
WING TO INTENSE competition from China,
worked for NutraSweet and now has his own consulting firm, Sweetness Technologies. The shutdown will leave China’s Niutang as the dominant low-cost producer of both aspartame and sucralose. Only one other major company besides Niutang, Japan’s Ajinomoto, will be left making aspartame, DuBois notes, and Ajinomoto’s aspartame business is also in distress. The firm recently told investors that global overcapacity and low Chinese prices were hurting profits. Ajinomoto is seeking a buyer for its aspartame plant in France, a move that would leave it with one plant in Japan. NutraSweet traces its roots back to pharmaceutical firm G.D. Searle, which invented aspartame in 1965 and brought it to market in 1981. Monsanto bought Searle in 1985 and sold NutraSweet to the private equity firm J.W. Childs in 2000. Aspartame lost patent protection in 1992, and NutraSweet has faced growing competition ever since. The story is similar for the artificial sweetener sucralose, whose original maker, Tate & Lyle, lost patent protection in 2009. In a call last month with investors, Tate & Lyle CEO Javed Ahmed blamed “irrational behavior by some market participants,” referring to Chinese firms, for erosion in the price of the firm’s Splenda brand sucralose. Ahmed offered no immediate remedy other than to say that the British firm would not compete for “certain volumes where we do not see value.”—MARC REISCH
ONE GUTSY DETOX
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ANNA SCHROLL
The fall armyworm (shown) defuses a benzoxazinoid plant toxin by reattaching a sugar to it in the opposite stereochemical configuration.
Daniel G. Vassão set out to learn why. The biochemist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology convinced an international team to help him CHEMICAL ECOLOGY: Insect digestive analyze caterpillar guts and feces with liquid chromaenzymes deactivate plant toxin with tography/mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance. The team found that the insects’ guts consingle stereochemical change tain an enzyme that reattaches the sugar to a particular benzoxazinoid. However, the enzyme does so with the CORE ONE for the fall armyworm in the game opposite stereochemical configuration compared with of survival: Researchers report that the plantthe original plant molecule (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2014, eating caterpillar and its close relatives use DOI: 10.1002/anie.201406643). The plant can no longer a strategy worthy of an organic chemist to defuse a unmask the modified toxin. poison found in maize leaves. The finding “These insects can one-up the plant OH could be of use in pest defensive machinery,” Vassão HO OH control. says. Only a few similar defense O CH3O O O OH strategies are known so far in Maize and related crops such as wheat the insect world. “I think many N O and rye contain defense other examples of the manipulation compounds called benzoxaof stereochemical centers during OH zinoids. Plant cells store insect metabolism are waiting to be Maize benzoxazinoid glucoside the highly reactive moldescribed,” Vassão adds. ecules masked with the sugar β-d-glucose. Jocelyn G. Millar, an insect chemical ecologist at The plants also produce an enzyme the University of California, Riverside, enjoyed readdesigned to cleave the masking group ing about how the researchers used LC/MS to watch if leaves are eaten by an insect. The unthe active form of the plant toxin be continuously masked benzoxazinoid should be toxic to depleted as it travels through the armyworm’s gut. any multilegged freeloaders, but it barely “You have to love the ingenuity of nature!” he says.— affects fall armyworms or related species. CARMEN DRAHL CEN.ACS.ORG
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OCTOBER 6, 2014
