Pure Fun™ and George Brown Food Scientist Aiming for Unique Organic Candy in a Sugar-Glutted Marketplace

by Lisa E. Boyes

Aiming to hit the “sweet spot,” where a unique combination of flavour, texture, colour and sweetness meet, all at a reasonable price in a new organic candy for kids—this was the challenge that confectioner Pure Fun presented to Winnie Chiu, food scientist with George Brown College’s Centre for Hospitality and Culinary Arts.

One hundred prototypes and some 2,000 jelly candies later, Pure Fun and Chiu are still working on that balance. “This is not an unusual number of prototypes and criteria to go through—we are getting close to the final formulation,” says Chiu. George Brown’s Office of Applied Research and Innovation is seed funding the research project, with Pure Fun contributing expertise and materials.

“We are now working with the organic version of the half-dozen flavours that have been confirmed,” adds Chiu. “New National Organic Program (NOP) standards have come in the middle of the testing process. Once we satisfy the 95 percent organic standard in terms of both the candies’ colour and flavour elements, we will be much closer to a unique, organic jelly candy.”
While the Canadian Food Inspection Agency regulates food quality and safety matters, Canada’s organic regulatory system is still principally voluntary. In order to standardize what organic elements can go into a food product and at what levels, so that consumers inside and outside North America know what they’re buying when it’s “certified organic,” Canadian confectioners like Pure Fun tend to operate according to the U.S. standard. The United States Department of Agriculture operates the NOP.

Pure Fun began as a “natural”—no artificial ingredients—candy company three years ago. But it has now embraced “organic” confections, which are not only derived from crops, but also follow soil-conservation and other sustainable farming practices, using no pesticides, additives or preservatives and no genetic-engineering techniques. The company’s products are also kosher, vegan and manufactured according to Fair Trade practices. The Pure Fun jelly candy aims to use certified-organic sweeteners, such as brown rice or agave syrup, along with colouring from, for example, organic beets. Such sweeteners have a lower glycemic index, meaning the sugars release more gradually in the body. They contain more fibre and nutrients than highly processed sugars and no significant cholesterol.

So far, Pure Fun has taken the prototypes to trade shows and asked participants to taste and vote on the flavour selections. Expert panels at George Brown’s Chef School have taste-tested the samples, along with about a dozen of the school’s students. These baking and culinary students are also helping to make the test candies onsite at the college as an extracurricular research project. Meanwhile, George Brown design students have researched the potential size and shape of the candies.

The next steps for George Brown’s food scientist, once the organic samples are finalized, will be helping Pure Fun to conduct and evaluate shelf-life tests of the gummy candies for freshness, then scale-up trials at the Pure Fun facilities to determine how manufacturing in quantity may influence the candy’s formulation.

But the best test in recipe making may be the last, when the real experts, a kids’ panel, tastes the final, pre-commercial product…strawberry, apple, chocolate, and more. Ultimately, Pure Fun and Chiu are out to demonstrate that a pretty healthy candy tastes really good, too.