Sucralose was accidentally discovered by Tate & Lyle in 1976, when scientists found a way to molecularly bond sucrose molecules with chlorine. At that time the company was looking for ways to use sucrose as a chemical intermediate.
Tate & Lyle PLC, a British global supplier of food and beverage ingredients to industrial markets, was working with researchers Leslie Hough and Shashikant Phadnis at Queen Elizabeth College (now part of King's College London).
On a late-summer day, Phadnis was told to test the powder. Phadnis thought that Hough asked him to taste it; so he did. He found the compound to be exceptionally sweet.
Ironically, sucralose states out as cane sugar but ends up 600 times sweeter than table sugar. Sucralose was approved in April 1998 by the FDA as a tabletop sweetener and for use in a number of desserts, confections, and nonalcoholic beverages. In 1999, sucralose was approved as a general-purpose sweetener.
The companies Tate & Lyle and Johnson & Johnson then jointly developed Splenda products. It was introduced in the United States in 1999 and is one of the most popular sweeteners in the country. Splenda has replaced NutraSweet as the most widely consumed sugar substitute on the market.
History of sucralose
