Bye-bye sugar — hello healthy sweetness! Meet the future of sweet. Sweet proteins are novel proteins from nature that charade as sweeteners but digest like proteins. That means you get the sweetness you deserve without any of the bad sugar and sugar-alternative side-effects (like triggered blood sugar levels and changing gut microbiomes).

It turns out that protein can do more than we thought — it’s not just for building muscle and keeping you full. Protein can also taste sweet!

The world needs better sweet foods and Oobli is on a mission to change the world with better low-sugar food and drinks using groundbreaking sweet proteins, produced through planet-friendly precision fermentation. Our first products featuring Oobli Fruit Sweet Protein are perfectly-sweet sweet teas and decadent dark chocolates.

Read more about sweet proteins and their incredible health and climate benefits.

Most sweet proteins come from fruits and berries that are native to West Africa and other similarly hard-to-reach (and difficult to grow in) places. Many of these fruits and berries have been used for centuries by locals as naturally occurring sweeteners. We like to think of them as "nature's candy."

We use a groundbreaking technology called precision fermentation to produce our Oobli Fruit Sweet Proteins. That means no single-crop farming, soil degradation or deforestation — we can produce sweet proteins locally through fermentation anywhere in the world.

The health benefits of sweet proteins are huge. 

Sweet proteins are digested and metabolized like any other dietary protein. That means they’ll have zero or neutral impact on your blood sugar, insulin levels, or gut microbiome. Plus, there are zero calories in sweet proteins compared to 4 calories per gram of sugar.

Brazzein, in particular—the protein found in the Oobli Fruit Sweet Protein and used in Oobli teas and chocolates — has been shown to have zero impact on blood sugar levels, no impact on the gut microbiome, and it digests like protein. It even has antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anti-allergic properties!

In short, sweet proteins like brazzein allow you to indulge in sweetness without sacrifice.

Because we use a groundbreaking technology called precision fermentation to produce our Oobli Fruit Sweet Proteins, we don’t have to rely on single-crop farming that can result in soil degradation and deforestation. We can produce sweet proteins locally through fermentation anywhere in the world with a low footprint. 

And our mission is also to reduce our dependence on sugar production. Sugar takes up huge amounts of land, uses tons of water, and is far from a regenerative crop. As in, sugarcane is often grown on steep slopes and hillsides, which leads to high rates of soil erosion and increased rates of water runoff. An estimated 5-6 million hectares of cropland are lost annually due to the severe soil erosion and degradation caused by sugar farming.

Producing sweet proteins through precision fermentation is an important first step to reclaiming the environment. Did you know that even just a 1% reduction in sugar production saves about 650,000 acres of land? With precision-fermented sweet proteins, this sort of reduction isn’t some pipedream; it’s a very real and crucially-important possibility.

With sweet proteins, a little goes a long way! Because sweet proteins are up to 10,000 times sweeter than sugar, we only need to use a tiny amount to bring sweetness to an entire can of our sweet teas. And when we say tiny, we mean tiny! Sweet proteins make up less than 1% of the total ingredients in our teas. 

Molecularly speaking, sweet proteins are just like any other dietary protein (think meat, dairy or legumes). If you ate a whole bunch of sweet proteins, you would actually contribute to your daily protein requirement in your diet. But again, because sweet proteins are way sweeter than sugar, a little really does go a long way — and we don’t use enough to add to the nutritional label.