Public Funding for Clever Sweets Limited

Clever Sweets, founded by Louise Carr-Smith, promotes a new way of thinking around healthy confectionery and healthy eating generally. Our collective aspiration is for our food to contain only ingredients that our bodies can make good use of and to improve our health and fitness. This is embodied in our 'clean label' approach to our products. This ethos is one that Louise is passionate about. A fellow of the Institute of Food Science, she has had a successful career history in senior positions at Unilever. Louise offers consultancy in HFSS, is on the advisory panel for Sugarwise as a Non-Executive, and speaks at events on the topic. There are many products on the market that include additional health-giving additives, but these are most commonly marketed as health supplements or 'semi-medicinal' products. We want our products to become 'mainstream', whilst remaining a tasty and healthy indulgence. In the ELEVATE project, Clever Sweets aims to prove processing and formulation for a range of hard candies, free from sugar and artificial flavours/preservatives/colours, and suitable for both children and adults. Alongside technical activities, Louise will be working hard to finalise the plans required to present the business to potential investors.

"We all know that the human body need minimum levels of vitamins and minerals to function effectively, and that most of these are present in the required levels in a balanced diet. In a perfect world, we would all consume these in a balanced diet, but we know that very few of us achieve this. A healthy individual can manufacture Vitamin D in their skin under the action of sunlight. Whole foods obviously contain vitamins in their natural forms but over the past 100 years, science has progressively found ways to synthesise the vitamins that our bodies need, and it is generally these forms that are added to processed foods. Whilst at first glance these artificial forms are identical to the natural forms (in that their chemical structures are the same) there is increasing awareness that these synthetic forms are not made available for absorption by the body in the same way as the natural compounds, and that therefore their full value is not being realised. We have been producing our Cleverpops confectionary since 2013\. Cleverpops contain only five ingredients (all natural). Sugar is replaced by Isomalt which provides a level of sweetness, that in combination with our natural flavours, gives them the taste that children and adults alike love, but without the harmful effects of sugar. Cleverpops contain Vitamin C (in synthetic form), but there are a number of additional vitamins that we would like to include in our candies. However, we don't want to add synthetic forms of the vitamins -- we want to build our reputation as a supplier of purely natural confectionery products. The Cle-VER-CANDY project will develop recipe formulations for a range of tasty, all natural, vitamin fortified hard confectionery products suitable children and adults alike."