We believe in the power of good old fashioned fruits & veggies to deliver all the flavor and sweetness we need.
It's a crazy ingredient world we live in today. The vast majority of beverages contain sweeteners, both artificial and/or natural. They make drinks taste sweeter, they add texture & flavors, sometimes they can even enhance nutritional values. But at Switchback, we don't play that game.
What Sweeteners are used in Beverages
The food ingredient industry has created 1,000's of different compounds that can be used to help food companies get to their perfect flavor. Some of the more common sweeteners used in the beverage industry include things like aspartame, sucralose, sugar, & erythritol. These compounds pack a huge flavor burst and only cost pennies for the manufactures to use. So why don't we believe in using them at Switchback?
Dangers of Artificial Sweeteners
We're not trying to be all gloom and doom here but there is a huge list of growing scientific evidence that artificial sweeteners can be bad - really bad - for your health. Take Erythritol for example. If you look at WebMD's page called "What is Erythritol" it only takes 2 paragraphs before they get to the dangers of the substance. According to WebMD's page, recent research shows erythritol may be associated with increased risk of heart attacks, strokes, and even death.
Aspartame, another common sweetener most commonly associated with diet soda's, was put on the WHO's list of "possibly carcinogenic to humans" in July of 2023. That does NOT mean that there is conclusive evidence that aspartame does cause cancer, but it does mean there's at least enough evidence to suggest we really need to dig in a lot more.
Sweet is complicated
Health & wellness reasons aside - the bigger challenge with creating a food product is what tastes good to you, may be very different to me. When it comes to sweetness preference the scales are gigantic. If we added something like sucralose to Switchback, which is 600x sweeter than sugar, you'd get a green smoothie mix that would taste like pure candy. I'm sure our children would probably love it - but the average adult wouldn't be able to take more than a sip or two before throwing out the smoothie. Even adding something like honey to our smoothie mix would tip the fructose vs. glucose scales to overly sweet.
We'll take Fruits for sweetness please
Our stance on sweetness is pretty simple. Don't add something to the product if we don't need to. We could cut costs by reducing the amount of real fruit we put in the smoothie packets, and replace it with sugar or some other artificial sweetener. But if we did that we wouldn't be living our mission of empowering 1,000,000 people to live the Switchback lifestyle. Empowerment > profit in our book.
We grew up loving the sweetness of fruit. It's simple. It's healthy. It's nature's perfect way to get a little extra carbohydrate into our bodies. We don't need our smoothies to taste like candy. We want our green smoothie mixes to taste, well, Real.
