Partially Hydrolysed Guar Gum (PHGG)

Guar gum is the milled endosperm of Cyamopsis tetragonoloba, a drought-tolerant legume grown across Rajasthan, Haryana and Gujarat, and it is one of the most viscous hydrocolloids in commercial food use. That viscosity is the whole problem when the object is to add fibre rather than thickness. Partially hydrolysed guar gum answers it by cutting the chain: controlled treatment with endo-beta-D-mannanase from Aspergillus niger drops the average molecular weight from the roughly 200,000-300,000 Da of native guar to about 20,000 Da, after which the hydrolysate is purified and spray-dried. The backbone chemistry is unchanged - a beta-1,4-linked D-mannose chain carrying alpha-1,6-linked D-galactose on approximately every second mannose unit, a mannose-to-galactose ratio near 2:1. What changes is behaviour. A 5% solution runs at low double-digit millipascal-seconds rather than thousands, dissolves clear in cold water, and leaves no perceptible mouthfeel or flavour, which is why PHGG rather than native guar is the fibre of choice for clear beverages, sachets, meal replacements and clinical nutrition. Commercially the material is sold on its fibre number, and the method matters as much as the figure. AOAC 985.29 and AOAC 2001.03 both quantify the galactomannan as dietary fibre but do not return the same value on the same lot, so the CoA must state which was run: standard trade grades are declared at 75% minimum on a dry basis, with high-fibre grades at 85% minimum. The polysaccharide is not hydrolysed by human digestive enzymes and survives heat processing and low pH across roughly pH 2-10, which allows it into retorted, acidified and baked applications where less robust fibres depolymerise or lose their fibre count. Guar gum is one of the isolated non-digestible carbohydrates named in the US FDA's 2016 nutrition-labelling final rule as counting toward declared dietary fibre, and PHGG carries US GRAS status; the position in each destination market should still be confirmed by the buyer's own regulatory function before artwork is committed. On allergens and origin the answer is clean, which is unusual for a legume-derived ingredient. Guar is a legume but it is neither soy nor peanut, and it appears on neither the EU Annex II list of fourteen declarable allergens nor the US FALCPA and FASTER Act list of nine. The product is plant-derived at every stage: vegan and vegetarian, with no dairy, egg, fish, crustacean, molluscan, bovine, porcine or other marine input, and no gluten-containing cereal in the process stream. The enzyme is a processing aid of fungal origin and is removed on purification. Thovek ships each lot against a CoA giving dietary fibre by the stated AOAC method, 5% viscosity, loss on drying, ash, heavy metals and full microbiology, with a signed allergen, origin and non-GMO declaration attached.