NutraSweet Company

[laughs]

Like Eric here, a biochemist who used to work at NutraSweet, where he developed artificial sweeteners.

I spent a, a lot of my career working on sweeteners, studying sweeteners, and ultimately writing a book about sweeteners.

And what scientists like Eric in the food industry do is they find or even make new sweet molecules.

... a full swimming pool.

Wow.

What was the mood and the reaction at NutraSweet to this news?

I was jealous.

Who was I working for at the time? PWC, PricewaterhouseCoopers.

And, you know, we were doing some, um, a proof of concept for an order management system for a company called Nutrasweet, uh, which you, you all have heard of.

So this is, uh, you know, way back when.

And, uh, so we're doing this, and then they, they decide to go with this thing called SAP, and I, I had never heard of SAP.

Now, I started...

I'm sorry, I, I misspoke.

It was Ernst & Young I, I did Nutrasweet with, and then I went over to PricewaterhouseCoopers, and that's when...

And then PWC at the time was r- they were kind of the, the first ones to really get on the, the, uh, uh, the SAP bandwagon before it became what it, what it's become today.

Um, aspartame is artificial.

Um, With brand names NutraSweet, Equal, and...

NutraSweet, Equal.

Kandarel are some of Aspartame's brand names.

Aspartame's the blue.

There was like...

And it w- we were eating NutraSweet-

Yeah

... which was, like, not...

They are not truly keto.

They are tricking you, okay? Just like when NutraSweet says, oh, a sugar free alternative, zero calorie.

But you look on the back of it and it has it has maltodextrose and dextrose in it.

Those are both sugar.

Well, they brought him back to a room.

They didn't use an NG tube to flush that Flavio they wanted to make him yak well there went dinner in the central daylight time zone um so they gave him activated charcoal to drink it did not take long before that worked and then of course there's a happy ending if sorting through that sort of result can be called a happy ending um Turned out the pill was the same color as a packet of NutraSweet.

Yeah, we made him throw up everything but his toenails because he had eaten without really opening the package.

A packet of NutraSweet.

Ah,

memories.

Artificial sweeteners, okay? We're talking about sugar alcohols.

I'm not necessarily talking about your Stevias and your Aspartames and NutraSweet.

You already-- You guys know how bad that is for you.

All right? I hope you do.

[instrumental music] In the last episode, Cumberland Packing used the US ban on cyclamates to turn Sweet'N Low into the leading tabletop sugar substitute.

But then Donald Rumsfeld helped aspartame escape regulatory quicksand and become the new market leader under the brands NutraSweet and Equal.

Now, fraud threatens to destroy Cumberland from within, but there's an even bigger threat coming, a newcomer called Splenda, and it's about to upend the entire market.

This is episode two: Sweet Goes Sour.

[instrumental music] It's February 1989, less than a year since Joe Asaro's sidewalk confession.

Cumberland President Marvin Eisenstadt has chosen to keep the fraud quiet, and for now, the secret holds.

But the company can't afford to stand still because NutraSweet's legal team is on the attack.

Their target? Cumberland Packing.

So these are non-nutritive.

They do not contain sugar, except if you're using NutraSweet, aspartame, um, Splenda, and some of the brands of, of Truvia stevia.

They, if you'll turn it over and read the ingredients, it contains actual literal sugar.

They call it dextrose because that makes it sound like, I don't know what dextrose is.

It comes in light blue packets, a direct rival to Sweet'N Low's pink.

But if you're a food and drink manufacturer, you're buying the same sweetener under a different name, NutraSweet.

The decision to brand an ingredient is unusual, but Searle has a challenge to overcome.

Aspartame tastes better than saccharin and doesn't require a cancer warning on the packaging, but it's 47 times more expensive.

But the resulting price difference is big enough for manufacturers to balk at using the new sweetener.

So Searle needs to stoke public demand for products containing aspartame.

It starts by requiring manufacturers who use the sweetener to put the NutraSweet logo on their packaging.

It also seeks to raise awareness using free gumballs and TV ads.