Commercial, synthetic nonnutritive sweeteners

Abstract

Nonnutritive sweeteners represent a large commercial market, and both in terms of volume and value of sales they fall between the majority of pharmaceutical compounds and bulk chemicals. The synthesis of these sweeteners can offer some unique challenges. The current large-scale methods used for the preparation of sweeteners that are currently allowed for usage in North America and Europe have been highlighted. The elegance of some of these syntheses is the simplicity of the methodology and is a reflection the amount of resources that have been expended to discover the approach and then reduce it to practical scale. Alternative approaches to some of the sweeteners, in particular biochemical methods, have been included as these could supercede total chemical synthesis.