How we cut the sugar without cutting the chew

Sugar in a classic gummy does three jobs at once: it sweetens, it holds water so the bite stays soft, and it gives the gel its body. Take it out and you get a sad, wet rubber band. So we stopped treating sugar as one ingredient and started treating it as three problems.

Job one: sweetness

The easy part. A mix of fruit juice concentrate and a little erythritol covers most of it. The trick is to keep the fruit loud enough that you do not miss the rest.

Job two: softness

Chicory root fibre holds water almost as well as sugar does. It also adds fibre, which is the reason a bag of Sour Cherry Rings has 8 g of it.

What did not work

• Pure allulose: soft, but it browned in the cooker.

• Too much pectin: chewy like a tyre.

• Agar: brittle, snapped instead of stretching.

Job three: body

Here we cheat a little. A slower cook at a lower temperature gives the pectin time to set, so the bite has that pull you expect.

Batch 38 was the first one our kids stole from the test table. That was the sign.

The test kitchen, week by week

We kept a notebook for every batch: the recipe, the cook temperature, the time in the starch moulds, and a score from one to five for chew, flavour and how fast the bag disappeared from the table. The first ten batches scored badly on all three. They were soft enough, but they tasted like fruit-flavoured cardboard and nobody stole them.

Batch twelve was the first turning point. We doubled the amount of real cherry juice and cut the water to match, which meant a thicker mix that was harder to pour but carried far more flavour. The score for flavour jumped from two to four overnight. The chew still collapsed after a day in the bag, so we knew the fibre ratio was wrong.

Why the chew kept collapsing

Chicory root fibre loves water. In the cooker that is exactly what you want, but once the gummies sit in a sealed bag the fibre keeps pulling moisture from the pectin network, and the bite goes from springy to mushy. We tried three fixes: less fibre, a longer drying time and a thin coat of acid and erythritol on the outside. Only the combination of the last two worked. A twenty-four hour rest on the trays sets the outside, and the sour coat seals it.

That coat turned out to be the best accident of the whole project. It is the fizz you taste first in every Sour Cherry Ring, and it is now on four of our six chewy flavours.

What our testers told us

• Kids did not care about the sugar number at all. They cared about the fizz and the colour.

• Parents read the back of the bag first and the front second.

• Everyone over forty asked whether it would stick to their teeth. It does not, because there is no glucose syrup holding it together.

We changed the bag because of that last point. The sugar number now sits on the front, in the same size as the flavour name, and the back explains in one sentence what replaced the sugar.

What it adds up to

The result sits at 4 g of sugar per 100 g bag. A classic gummy has around 46 g. You can see the full numbers for every flavour on its page in the shop.

1. Fruit juice and a little erythritol for sweetness.

2. Chicory root fibre for the soft bite.

3. A slow, low cook for the pull.

Next month: why our sour coat uses two acids instead of one.