New Concept Development of a Blood Glucose-Balancing Functional Beverage

Abstract: Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) have known to be one of the most common degenerative diseases which highly correlate with lifestyle, including consumption habits. It cannot be denied that the availability and accessibility to high processed food, high in carbohydrates play an important role on increasing the risk of T2DM. On the contrary, consumers’ awareness towards health and nutrition are also rising. These situations open the opportunity for food industries to develop more functional products which can give additional benefits and fulfil the consumers’ needs. Categorized as ‘supplementary drink’ in the U.S. market, Good Idea® came as a functional beverage with its blood-sugar regulating effect from the amino acids and chromium combination. A line extension was aimed to be done based on the existing product which were the flavoured sparkling water with the addition of amino acids and chromium. Natural ingredients were aimed to be introduced as the new concept of ‘infused Good Idea®’ which sourced from fruits, specifically by utilising Nordic berries. Combinations of berries and some other fruits were tried during the development process, including some different types of fruit sources. At the end, fruit juice concentrate (FJC) was chosen as the fruit source which suited to most with the carbonated premix-base. Various fruits: mango, apple, cloudberry, blackcurrant, cranberry, sea buckthorn, lingonberry were evaluated to create the new fruit combination for the line extension. However, combination of apple, cloudberry, blackcurrant, and cranberry became the main fruit combination with addition of flavouring agent to sharpen the product character. Some issues were identified on the development stage, such as unwanted stable foam formation, unpleasant colour, and acidity (sourness) level. These issues were then evaluated and solutions were provided. Since blackcurrant were identified as the cause of the unwanted stable foam formation, adjustment on the formula of the drink was done. Following the foam reduction, colour and acidity were also improved by adjusting the FJC combination on the formula which resulted on two final formulae with pH <3.90. Both formulas were evaluated based on the sensory properties through a focus group discussion (FGD) and hedonic sensory evaluation. The product is aimed to be packed in cans with 355mL volume. Additionally, tunnel pasteurization 70°C for 30 minutes was decided as the heat treatment method as it was done on the existing product line. In this case, the effect of heat treatment was investigated towards some properties, such as colour and vitamin C content. The result shows that heat treatment produces a darker product due to anthocyanin degradation and non-enzymatic browning. Further, around 32-35% reduction of initial vitamin C were obtained as the impact of heat treatment. As a part of analysis, antioxidant capacity was investigated based on DPPH antioxidant capacity method. This method showed that all of the developed formulae have rather high potential antioxidant capacity, comparable with orange. High content of phenolic compounds on the berries might be the reason behind this result. The new approach of meal study by using continuous glucose monitoring is quite promising and can be considered as an alternative from the traditional meal study. However, no firm conclusion can be drawn from the study due to some limitation, including the small number of research subjects. In this case, no significant difference was found on all of the incremental area under the curve (iAUC) within 0-120 minutes on all types of drinks with three different meals.