Many customers were waiting for them, especially diabetics or those who pay attention to their line. The Hautes-Vosges confectionery, in Plainfaing, now offers sugar-free sweets to its customers. “We’ve been thinking about making little sugar-free candies for a couple of years now because we have customers who ask us for them. And then, when we were confined, we had a lot of time to refine our projects that were on hold. So we worked throughout this period on sugar-free sweets”says Fabienne Picard, CEO of the Hautes-Vosges confectionery.
We really wanted to be able to keep the artisanal production
The sugar-free sweets keep their natural flavors, with the essential eucalyptus, in particular. But the confectionery had to rack its brains to find the right recipe. “To make sweets, our raw material is sugar. So if you don’t want sugar, you have to replace the sugar with an ingredient and that was where the debate was. Which ingredient, which sweetener? can we take to be able to make our sweets without sugar?”explains Fabienne Picard.
Finally, the Hautes-Vosges confectionery chose isomalt to replace sugar. “We really wanted to be able to keep the artisanal production. We wanted to be able to cook in the copper cauldrons and work the dough with our bare hands as we already do today with traditional sweets. So it was isomalt that was chosen, it is a sweetener that comes from beets”says Fabienne Picard.
A higher production hit
Who says candies without sugar, says all the same caloric candies. “Candy without calories, it does not exist. With or without sugar, there are still calories but there are less. It is especially that for diabetics, candy without sugar does not raise the rate of blood sugar. So it’s more of a candy that is intended for people who have health problems”, adds Fabienne Picard.
But who says sugar-free sweets, also says more expensive sweets. “Undeniably yes. We have no choice because isomalt costs ten times more than sugar. Automatically, we cannot have the same selling price when the main raw material is much more expensive. And then also , we make less sugar-free candies in the same time allowed for sweet candies, so we also have a slightly higher production cost”says Fabienne Picard.