Jaffa oranges have long since been one of the most famous Israeli export products. And while orange juice is full of vitamins and minerals, it’s also packed with sugar – one serving contains almost 1 ounce of the stuff. Plus, the juicing process leaves the juice devoid of the natural fiber found in the whole fruit, so that healthy-feeling glass of OJ isn’t actually as good for us as our moms told us.
This is what the Better Juice start-up wanted to solve. The four-person, Ashdod-based enterprise collaborated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to develop an innovative technology that reduces the load of simple sugars in 100% orange juice without taking away the all-orangey taste of the drink.
The company’s patent-pending enzymatic technology uses natural ingredients to convert simple sugars like fructose, glucose and sucrose into non-digestible fibers and sugars. These, according to Better Juice, have been shown to have a number of health benefits.
“Our innovation is in having a solution to reduce all types of sugar in juices with a cost-effective technology, without altering the other juice ingredients. We use non-GMO micro-organisms with a sustainable technology,” Eran Blachinsky, Better Juice’s founder and CEO, explains.
“One cannot reduce sugars without reducing sweetness,” Blachinsky admits. “The bio-converted molecules and the dietary fibers have some sweetness – less than sugar, but still sweet. Therefore, bio-converting all the sugars doesn’t eliminate the sweetness, it only reduces it.”
