Oobli aims to rehabilitate sweets by replacing sugar with proteins that are thousands of times as sweet as regular sugar.
Sugar and artificial sweeteners produce the sensation of sweetness by bombarding the top of the tongue’s taste receptors. But Oobli chief technology officer Jason Ryder says brazzein, a much larger molecule, binds to specific sites on our taste receptors, thus activating a longer-lasting sweetness signal. “It’s the same signal that says sweetness,” he says. “These proteins are so good at tricking your taste receptors into thinking that they’re sugar.”
