Monk fruit sweetener

Monk fruit sweetener is an extract of the dried fruit of Siraitia grosvenorii (Swingle) C. Jeffrey ex A. M. Lu & Zhi Y. Zhang, a Cucurbitaceae vine known in Chinese as luo han guo. Its sweetness comes not from sugars but from mogrosides, cucurbitane-type triterpene glycosides, of which mogroside V is the principal one: CAS 88901-36-4, molecular formula C60H102O29, molecular weight 1287.4, and reported at roughly 250 times the sweetness of sucrose. Mogrosides IV and VI, siamenoside I and 11-oxo-mogroside V contribute to the overall profile. The fruit is picked, dried, extracted with hot water, enriched on adsorption resin and by chromatography, and spray dried, so the commercial grade is defined by the mogroside V figure the HPLC returns: Thovek supplies 25%, 40% and 50% mogroside V as the standard range, reports total mogrosides alongside it, and can source high-purity mogroside V at 95% and above where a defined-chemistry input is required. Two facts shape every monk fruit enquiry, and both belong on the quotation rather than in the small print. The first is origin. The vine is grown commercially almost entirely in Guangxi in southern China and is not a crop of any scale in India, so Thovek's material is Chinese in origin and is declared as such on the invoice, the certificate of origin and every customs entry — it will not be represented as Indian-origin material whatever the port of shipment. The second is regulatory reach, which is narrower than the marketing around this ingredient suggests. In the United States luo han guo fruit extract is Generally Recognised as Safe: FDA issued a no-questions letter on GRAS Notice GRN 301 in 2010, with further notices following. In China it is a permitted food additive under GB 2760. In the European Union only a specific aqueous monk fruit extract is authorised, as a novel food under Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/2345 of October 2024; highly purified mogroside preparations and non-aqueous extracts remain unauthorised, so an EU-bound order has to be matched to the authorised specification rather than assumed in. In India, FSSAI treats monk fruit extract as a non-specified food ingredient requiring prior approval and has acted against products sold without it as recently as August 2026 — which means Indian domestic sale is a wholly separate question from export. On the bench the extract is an off-white to light tan free-flowing powder with a mild characteristic fruity note. It is readily soluble in water and holds up through the heat and acid conditions of normal beverage and bakery processing, but it brings none of sucrose's bulk, browning or water-activity effect, so it is almost always formulated with a bulking agent rather than used alone. Where a table-top or spoon-for-spoon product is wanted, Thovek blends the extract with erythritol to an agreed sucrose equivalence; that blend is a different product with a different tariff line and is quoted separately. The extract carries no declarable allergens — no milk, egg, fish, crustacean, mollusc, soy, peanut, tree nut, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin or gluten-containing cereal at any stage — and is vegan and vegetarian with no bovine, porcine or marine input. Each lot ships with a CoA covering mogroside V and total mogrosides by HPLC, moisture, ash, residual solvents, heavy metals, pesticide residues and full microbiology.