Meet our challenge solver - Magnus Nilsson

Challenge

Providing the best service is paramount throughout our slate of products and offerings, and when it's your own brand, we ensure that the services are just as congruent. CalSand, our sugar-sanding solution, is a high-quality product that is largely used in sweets and confectionery. What value can we bring to the table for one of our largest customers, a leading player in the confectionery industry?

Solution

CalSand delivers the service of sugar acid coating to our customer’s extensive range of products including candies, chocolates, pastilles, and more. Blending sugar and acid is not a sought-after process. It can get rather dusty in the production space, especially during packing, and requires testing for quality and taste. Our site in Knislinge, Sweden, allows us to support the customer commercially and technically.

Since sugar is the key ingredient in confectionery, the size of the crystal is crucial. Finding the right size can be an arduous process, both from technology and supply chain perspective. Not all candies can be sanded with a sugar/acid blend, there must be no bleed – if the sugar/glucose ratio is not right then water is drawn from the candy and can ruin the bag of treats. Our technical food specialists experiment with different parameters for the best outcome and our extensive network of suppliers prove to be very useful.

We also develop recipes in the application lab on our site along with alternatives for evaluation. Every new blended batch is tested. Flavors, such as apple and citrus, are also added and tested for their mouthfeel. Tweaking the recipe with different coatings often affects the taste as well as the mouthfeel, resulting in a spectrum that varies between an early or late release of the acid in the mouth. When we seek to align confectionary with consumer trends such as low-sugar and palm-oil-free alternatives, these functionalities are often compromised, deteriorating the quality of the sweet treat. Our food application expertise in formulation and technical know-how enables us to successfully resolve these challenges.