The drive to satisfy the sweet tooth of the American consumer seems to become more complicated and confusing every year. The realities of the obesity epidemic create a divide that nearly every consumer confronts on a daily basis.

The demand for alternative sweeteners is such that, according to a report by the Freedonia Group, annual sales will hit $1.6 billion by 2020, or roughly a third higher than in 2010.

In recent years, even as sucrose has continued to score at the top of consumers’ professed ingredient concerns, nutritive sweeteners and even plain sucrose have shed many of their unwarranted negative connotations to reassert their class as sweeteners of choice for a spectrum of food and beverage formulations.

In the decade between 2003 and 2014, the percentage of kids enjoying a daily sugar- or similarly calorically sweetened beverage fell from nearly 80% to under 61%, and the number of adults doing the same fell from almost 62% down to 50%.