As global health concerns rise and governments seek to curb obesity and diabetes rates, sugar taxes have become a widespread policy tool. From Europe to Asia, numerous countries have implemented levies on sugary drinks and products, signaling a significant shift in consumer markets and regulatory landscapes. For businesses, this trend represents a fundamental change in how products are formulated, marketed, and consumed.

This workshop presents a holistic toolbox for high-intensity sweetener modification, built on a breakthrough scientific insight that taste can be smelled, enabling new approaches to product innovation, differentiation, and profitability in the food and beverage industry.

• Sweet taste functions as an evolutionarily conserved signal that guides humans toward foods rich in readily available energy.
• Sweet perception emerges from the dynamic interplay between bottom-up sensory signals and top-down cognitively mediated processes, including memory, expectation, and learned associations.
• Sweetness can be smelled via the retro nasal pathway unlocking a new strategy for sugar reduction.
• Mouthfulness is essential in sugar reduction. It is driven by oral tribology rather than rheology and accelerates the onset of sweetness.
• Sweet lingering from high-intensity sweeteners arises in both the oral and retro nasal cavities, calling for new tools that can suppress both pathways simultaneously.