How sweet it is

Mr. Tidbit must admit that, although he moves pretty rapidly to discuss the latest silly version of Oreo cookies or the most recent reduction in the size of a can of tuna, there are some categories of food products that are so far from his natural area of interest that he sometimes falls behind in his coverage of them. (He might have said that these products aren't in his wheelhouse, but having a wheelhouse is not really in Mr. Tidbit's wheelhouse.)

Today he attempts to catch up with the world of sugar substitutes. The last one he recalls mentioning before he blanked out a couple of years ago was stevia, extracted from the very sweet leaves of the stevia plant, and available under several brand names.

Because it is much less bulky than sugar you can't simply substitute stevia for sugar when baking cakes and cookies. So just as happened with Splenda, now sugar mixed with stevia is available for baking. In fact, there are at least two competing brands of sugar-with-stevia: Truvia Baking Blend and C&H Light.

And, moving past stevia, now there's Nectresse, a sweetener based on the very sweet monkfruit, of which Mr. Tidbit hadn't heard previously any more than he had heard previously of the very sweet leaves of the stevia plant.

The highly competitive business of sugar substitutes includes stevia (Truvia, Pure Via), acesulfame potassium (Sunett, Sweet One), sucralose (Splenda), aspartame (Nutra­Sweet — Do you remember NutraSweet? You're so 20th-century!) and several more. But what Mr. Tidbit finds most interesting about Nectresse is that it's from McNeil Nutritionals, so the maker of Splenda is competing with itself.

Raw, raw, raw!

For what it's worth, the maker of Sugar in the Raw (crystals of brown sugar known as turbinado sugar) also makes Stevia in the Raw, Agave in the Raw and Monkfruit in the Raw.

Enter the dragon

In the same breath as monkfruit (things you never heard of that are suddenly everywhere), the newest flavor of Welch's refrigerated juice cocktails (there are now 12) is dragon fruit/mango.

Al Sicherman