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.

  1. Sucronic Acid : 200,000
  2. Thioureido derivatives of aspartame : 50,000
  3. Super-aspartame : 8,000
  4. Thaumatin : 2,000-3,000
  5. PS 100 : 2,200
  6. Alitame : 2,000
  7. Monelin : 1,500-2,000
  8. Saccharin : 300
  9. Aspartame : 180
  10. Cyclamate : 30
  11. 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.