Taste proteins
What are sweet proteins?
Sweet proteins are a small family of proteins found in tropical fruits that taste intensely sweet. Brazzein is the sturdiest and cleanest of them. TomorrowSweet™ is brazzein reimagined: the same natural amino acids, rebuilt for better taste.
What are sweet proteins?
Sweet proteins are proteins that trigger the sweet receptor on your tongue the way sugar does, at a tiny fraction of the amount. A handful are known from plants: brazzein and pentadin from the oubli fruit of West and Central Africa, thaumatin from the katemfe fruit, monellin from the serendipity berry, mabinlin from a Chinese caper, and two, curculin and miraculin, that change how sour foods taste rather than tasting sweet on their own.
Which sweet protein is the sweetest?
Thaumatin, brazzein and monellin are each reported at well over a thousand times sweeter than sucrose by weight, with the exact figure varying by study, concentration and the form tested. In practice all three are potent enough that a product needs milligrams where sugar needs grams.
Why are sweet proteins hard to use?
Three reasons. Supply: a rare fruit in a rainforest is not a supply chain, so most work on sweet proteins today is about making them at scale rather than harvesting them. Stability: some, like monellin, lose their sweetness when heated, which rules out most food processing. Taste: sweet proteins arrive later and linger longer than sugar, and thaumatin adds a licorice-like note. Brazzein has the best answer to the second and third problems, which is why Tomorrow started there.
Which sweet protein tastes most like sugar?
Brazzein, in most reports: a fast, clean sweetness without thaumatin's licorice note or the bitterness of many plant sweeteners. Regular brazzein still arrives a beat late and lingers a beat long. Those are the two gaps Tomorrow fixes. TomorrowSweet™ v1.9 is 90% identical to sugar in taste, all within a single, simple protein.
Is brazzein heat stable?
Yes. Brazzein is small and sturdy: published work shows it keeps its sweetness after hours at near-boiling temperature and across the acidity of most drinks. That is why it can go through the processes real products go through, and why TomorrowSweet™ is in market in a beverage.
Are sweet proteins sweeteners?
Functionally, yes: they replace the sweetness sugar provides. But they are proteins, not small-molecule sweeteners. Your body digests a sweet protein down to amino acids like any other protein, with no glucose or insulin response.
What is the difference between a sweet protein and a taste protein?
A sweet protein tastes sweet. A taste protein is a protein Tomorrow has invented to create any delicious taste you can imagine on your tongue: sweet first, then salt, cream, and tastes that do not exist yet. TomorrowSweet™ is both, a sweet protein and the first Tomorrow Taste Protein™.
Brazzein was the best of the family. TomorrowSweet™ is what it becomes.
Tomorrow did not pick brazzein because it was perfect. It picked brazzein because it was closest, then rebuilt it: the same natural amino acids, reimagined so the sweetness arrives when sugar's would and leaves when sugar's would.
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Sources for the general facts above: the published literature summarised at Wikipedia, Brazzein, Wikipedia, Thaumatin and Wikipedia, Monellin. Statements about TomorrowSweet™ are Tomorrow's own. Published 2026-09-01.