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Natural zero-calorie sweeteners have so far been caught between two imperatives: What they want to say and what they can deliver. It used to be that natural sweeteners weren’t sweet enough; now they have an added problem: They aren’t fully natural.

“‘Natural’ would mean that I picked it from the ground,” said Donna LiVolsi, the director of operations at Cumberland Packing Corporation, which invented Sweet’N Low, the first artificial sweetener sachet, in 1957. I met her near the Navy Yards of Brooklyn, where Cumberland still makes Sweet’N Low, along with value brands of aspartame and sucralose and a couple of natural-sugar substitutes — Stevia in the Raw and Monk Fruit in the Raw. When I asked LiVolsi if she thought these latter two were “natural,” she said she couldn’t answer, because each consumer has a sense of what the word means to them.

It’s a question that has bedeviled beverage-makers, too. In the fall of 2012, a German food company surveyed 4,000 people in eight European countries, to find out how they understood the “natural” claim. Almost three-quarters said they thought that natural products were more healthful and that they’d pay a premium to get them. More than half argued that natural products have a better taste. But the respondents weren’t sure what degree or form of processing would be enough to strip a product of its natural status. Some drew a line between sea salt (natural) and table salt (artificial). Others did the same for dried pasta and powdered milk, though both are made by dehydration.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/magazine/the-quest-for-a-natural-sugar-substitute.html?pagewanted=all