Producers have turned to packaging a formerly ignored sweet plant into an alternative to sugar and other sweeteners, with a Bulacan grower of the Stevia plant as the first to venture into the business.
A grower in Bulacan, Glorius Industrial and Development Corp., has presented its packaged sweetener, Sweet and Fit Stevia, as an exhibitor at the recent 13th National Biotechnology Week at a mall in Quezon City.
The company has engaged into plantation type farming in Bocaue, Bulacan, to ensure steady production as it waits for their product’s acceptance by Filipino households as another healthy option as sweetener.
It has also sought assistance from the Department of Science and Technology for the required technology and machinery in processing the product.
At its booth at the exhibit was also a concoction of coffee, where Stevia was being labelled as one of three ingredients purported to “boost body weight loss.”
The Stevia plant sweetener extract was among some of the common edible plant and other food items that were being packaged into their several by-products for household food ingredients or additives.
Medical bulletins posted online by various science and medical organizations said the sweetener was actually the active compounds of stevia, the steviol glycosides, or chiefly the stevioside, and rebaudioside.
The active ingredients have 150 or 200 times the sweetness of sugar, “are heat-stable, pH-stable and not fermentable,” according to a crowdsourcing web site.
The name of the plant was credited to Spanish botanist and physician Petrus Jacobus Stevus, a professor of botany at the Spain’s University of Valencia, although history of the plant use as sweetener was traced to as early as 1,500 years ago in South America.
In the coffee concoction by the same Bulacan company, which it named Maxitrim Coffee, it said Stevia is mixed also with malunggay, with antioxidant property and an L-Carnitine that are known to burn body fats.
Maura de Leon, the company’s owner and tagged as “queen of Philippine Stevia,” said the Stevia-sweetened coffee “can boost weight loss, increase blood flow, reduce fatigue and increase muscle mass.”
The extraction of a sweetener from the Stevia plant was also made in 2015 by students in General Santos City in South Cotabato. They presented the extraction in the Enactus National Competition 2015 at SMX Convention Center in Pasay City.
The experiment won the nod of judges that sent the student scientists to the international business competition in Johannesburg, South Africa, in October that same year to the global science fair, called Enactus World Cup.
The feat by students of Enactus-Holy Trinity College Chapter bested 15 other schools during the national business competition in Pasay City, and which also got the attention of General Santos City Mayor Ronnel Rivera, who ordered its Youth Affairs and Development Office “to look after the needs of the team.”
He said the city government would also give “financial incentives to boost their morale. We have to do this so that we encourage more students to excel more in different fields.”
The city information office in General Santos City said Enactus “is a global community of students, academics and business leaders committed to using the power of entrepreneurial action to transform lives and shape a more sustainable world”.
The school’s project involved “the development of Stevia plant as an organic substitute to commercial sugars.” It was developed by Theo Nationales, James Perpetua, Lester Salazar, Hannah Untal, Carmel Calipo and Kevin Dave Pitogo, the General Santos City information office said.
“There are chemicals mixed in the sugars that we buy in the market, and we all know that they can be harmful. That was the reason we searched for alternatives, and that started everything,” Pitogo said in the statement.
Pitogo added that “it is not solely for competition purposes why we developed Stevia to be a sugar alternative. It can be a great help to our agricultural sector if ever it [Stevia] will become in-demand.”
Image credits: Manuel T. Cayon