Here's a list of
relative sweetness of some compounds some of which are used as
artifical sweetners. The common
sugar, obtained from
natural sources such as
sugar cane of
sugar beet is
saccharose. This is given the relative sweetness value of
1,
dilute samples of the other compounds are given to people in taste panels, and they say whether they think the samples sweetness is more or less. The dilution
factor can then be used to gauge the relative sweetness of each compound, which respect to saccharose.
- Sucronic Acid : 200,000
- Thioureido derivatives of aspartame : 50,000
- Super-aspartame : 8,000
- Thaumatin : 2,000-3,000
- PS 100 : 2,200
- Alitame : 2,000
- Monelin : 1,500-2,000
- Saccharin : 300
- Aspartame : 180
- Cyclamate : 30
- Saccharose : 1
That sucronic acid must be a real taste explosion, I can't even begin to comprehend what a spoonfull of that in a cup of
tea would taste like.
These notes and figures are taken from the book "World Records in Chemistry" by Faust, Knaus, and Siemeling ISBN 3-527-29574-7 published in 1999 by Wiley-VCH.