Xylitol is gone, but the memory lingers on

Finnish birches and studly males advertise the product around the world, even though Cultor was sold to the Danes years ago

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By Jouni Kantola in Florence and Helsinki
     
      A Finnish man comes a cropper in an Italian chewing gum advertisement that has a slight echo of an old Finnish classic about Santa Claus*.
      A breathy and rather gorgeous reporter leads a small film crew deeper into the woods surrounding a summery lakeland landscape, and she whispers to the camera:
      "Somewhere very close at hand is a magnificent male. We will have to tranquilise it for a moment so that we can examine the specimen in more detail."
      A marksman equipped with a dart rifle steps forward, goes into a crouch, and takes a bead on a blond-haired young man. He squeezes the trigger.
     
The young man, clad in jeans and a fur waistcoat, falls to the ground with a sigh and a thud, and the breathy reporter rushes to his side. She pushes his lips apart and reveals to the camera the teeth of the drugged youth.
      "Yes, a typical Finn! Teeth in perfect condition. For years they have been eating xylitol up there in Finland, helping to prevent against dental caries", she says enthusiastically, and pops a piece of Vivident xylitol chewing gum alluringly into her mouth.
     
Tullia Sassi of the Florence advertising agency Selection says that the clip was actually shot just outside Stockholm and that the Finnish male was in fact a Swede.
      "But the idea for the ad came from the fact that xylitol is made from birch trees, and the birch is strongly associated with Finland. And anyway, isn’t Finland a major producer of xylitol sweeteners?"
      Well... yes and no.
     
The Finnish foodstuffs firm Cultor was sold off in 1999 to the world’s largest manufacturer of xylitol-sweetened products, the Danish company Danisco.
      On the other hand, the world’s largest xylitol plant is still located in Kotka, where Suomen Sokeri (which became Cultor in 1989) established it in 1972.
      When Danisco bought out Cultor in March 1999, they also acquired a xylitol production facility in Illinois in the United States and they have since opened a third plant, in China.
     
"It is interesting to see how xylitol products get marketed in different countries. References to the Finnish natural environment or to Finnish teeth and dental hygiene are admittedly some of the most common ones we see", said Nicholas Dunning, the Sweeteners and Pharma EVP at Danisco’s Texturants and Sweeteners Division, when Helsingin Sanomat contacted him in London.
      Another rather odd feature of the global conquest of xylitol is the fact that the ingredient itself - a naturally-occurring 5-carbon polyol sweetener found in many fruits and vegetables as well as in birch wood - has become such a strong brand, reflected in the names of almost all products that contain it.
      It’s almost as if a bag of sweets would always have "sugar" inserted somewhere in the name.
     
For Danisco, however, such things as branding and marketing are not much more than a curiosity - the company is much more intertested in producing enough xylitol to satsfy a world market that is expanding at an annual rate of around 10%.
      Dunning reported that the value of the market for xylitol is currently something like EUR 250 million a year. Danisco enjoys a market share of more than 60 per cent, but in recent times things have become rather tighter on the competition front.
      Demand is growing rapidly in Asia.
      Last autumn Danisco and other sweetener manufacturers ran into a situation where supply could not keep up with demand.
      "The Chinese market for xylitol has grown faster than anyone could have imagined. We’ve got over the shortages that were experienced last year, however, and we are currently able to deliver adequate amounts of xylitol into the market", says Dunning.
     
In Asia, too, sales of products containing xylitol are booming on the back of Finnish images. As the linked earlier IntEd article demonstrates, Santa Claus was harnessed to sell xylitol chewing gum in the South Korean market, making Esa Peltonen of Rovaniemi famous as an unlikely and strangely dressed Father Christmas figure muttering the words "hyvä hyvä" ("Good-Good") while holding up a pack of chewing gum.
      According to Professor Kauko K. Mäkinen, who has spent more than 20 years focusing on the effects of the sugar alcohol xylitol on dental caries, xylitol products have broken through in a big way in the last two or three years in supermarkets across Japan and South Korea.
      For a long while xylitol products were sold only in specialist health shops and at dentists’ consulting rooms.
      Mäkinen is known in Korea as someone who has appeared in TV commercials as an expert on caries and its prevention.
      Life-sized cardboard cutout images of the Finnish professor have advertised xytlitol-sweetened products in stores.
     
Mäkinen admits to more than a twinge of regret that the xylitol knowhow that was developed in Finland over the decades has now been sold away.
      Then again, he acknowledges that it is hard to imagine how the sale could have been prevented, except by some kind of public outcry. As he notes, the original industry and the research and development work that led to commercial applications was funded in part by taxpayers’ money, for example in the form of grants from the National Technology Agency, TEKES.
     
There is certainly no point in yearning after xylitol any longer.
      The site manager at Danisco Sweeteners’ Kotka factory Henrik Sundén says that the Chinese are these days perfectly capable of producing xylitol that can compete in quality and price. Competition is getting tougher, even in a climate of expanding markets.
      "When new plants are built, they will probably be located closer to the fast-growing markets, for instance in China. I think it is rather unlikely that we will see any increase in production in Finland", says Sundén, who managed the Kotka facility already back in the days when it was owned by Cultor.
     
Henrik Sundén confirms that the plant continues working at full capacity and providing employment for around 175 workers, and the production processes are constantly being developed and upgraded.
      “It is nice to be in a branch where the market is expanding like this”, he says.
      That's good-good.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 30.9.2007
     
*Added here at the bottom of the YouTube links. Don't let the kids see it. Searching on “Xylitol” in YouTube will bring up a host of commercials from around the world, including the three listed here below

More on this subject:
 "Top secret ingredient" protects U.S. military teeth

Previously in HS International Edition:
  Big in Korea - thanks to a chewing-gum commercial (16.12.2003)

Links:
  YouTube: Finland Specimen Hunt
  YouTube: Bizarre scenes in Korea
  YouTube: And in Japan
  About Xylitol
  Danisco - Xylitol
  TEKES
  YouTube: Another kind of Finnish specimen hunt

JOUNI KANTOLA / Helsingin Sanomat