Is it time for this 1980s fat substitute in food?

The dream of a fat substitute that delivers taste with no nasty side effects has long haunted food scientists. Now, an Indianapolis businessman thinks he has found the answer: a new product that could revolutionize foods from peanut butter to baked goods to fries.

Drawing on technology developed decades ago, his company Choco Finesse has brought back a fat replacement substance called Epogee.

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The former Dow AgroSciences employee and sole employee of Choco Finesse thinks his fat substitute could prove the answer for an overweight nation.

“We can have this huge potential impact on foods people actually eat,” said David Rowe, president of Choco Finesse. “The key point is it has an astounding reduction of calories and it doesn’t affect taste.”

Epogee, which could start appearing in some foods by the middle of next year, will only be available to large commercial food makers.

Blommer Chocolate Company, the largest chocolate ingredient supplier in the U.S., recently unveiled its  Wonder Line of confectionery coatings made with Epogee. It comes in flavors such as milk and dark chocolate and yogurt. Wonder Line coatings have about one-third fewer calories than standard coatings and almost two-thirds fewer calories from fat.

When Rowe approached Blommer about his new fat substitute, the food experts were dubious that Epogee could deliver on his promise of reducing fat while keeping taste intact, said Shane Benedict, Blommer's corporate vice president for research and development and quality.

“It just sounded too good to be true, it really did,” he said.

The company reached out to its customers to ask what they thought, and the results were almost uniformly positive, Benedict said. In many cases, the tasters could not tell the difference between products made with Wonder Line coatings. In some instances, they preferred the foods made with Epogee.

Blommer has an exclusive relationship with Choco Finesse to offer its customers Wonder Line products to use in foods such as chocolate coated pretzels, peanuts and granola bars.

Food companies may embrace the new product not just to offer reduced calorie treats but to craft richer treats, Benedict said. In other words, a company may opt to add additional chocolate coatings or chips to their cookies or increase serving size while keeping calorie counts intact.

“This allows our customers to provide the customer a benefit of increased indulgence,” he said. “This product exceeded expectations. … In my 20-plus years of working in the food industry, I personally have not worked with an ingredient that has been able to deliver like the Epogee has in our products as a direct one for one replacement for fat.”

Epogee traces its origins to the late 1980s and a unique partnership between a Philadelphia area food company, Best Foods, and the Arco Chemical Company. Scientists from the two collaborated to work on finding an Oily Grail: a fat substitute that would perform as well as the real thing but have fewer calories.

At about the same time, another group of scientists were working on a different form of a fat substitute, one that combined sugars with vegetable oils. Approved for use in 1996, this product soon became notorious not for its calorie reduction but for the uncomfortable gastrointestinal side effects it produced.

Olestra’s foibles might have only spurred the development of the alternative. Over the course of the decade, the two companies working on Epogee conducted multiple trials on humans, testing their substance not only for taste, but also for safety and side effects. The new substance passed each trial with flying colors, Rowe said.

Fat is made up of fatty acids that stretch out like fingers. Glycerin serves as a knuckle that binds the molecule together, Rowe said. To make Epogee, scientists came up with the idea of pulling apart the fatty acids and adding a connector of esterified propoxylated glycerol, aka Epogee. Once the connector is added on, instead of breaking and generating excess energy, the fatty acids exit the body whole much like fiber does.

Numerous studies found this fat replacement safe and effective.

But in the late 1990s, the quest for a fat substitute ended. Best Foods and Arco Chemical Company were sold and neither of the new owners was interested in pursuing a fat substitute. Besides, the dismal reception of Olestra had left a bad taste in the mouth of consumers when it came to fat substitutes.

Unilever, which acquired Best Foods, had a relationship with Kansas State University, and donated all its materials related to the fat substitute development to that institution. At that time, the two companies had invested about $50 million in the project, said Kent Glasscock, president of the Kansas State University’s Institute for Commercialization.

The university did not hesitate to accept the gift.

“We thought that perhaps we could figure out how to move it forward, although we knew that there were significant challenges,” Glasscock said.

Indeed, it would take a few years before the university found the right person. An alumnus who had worked at Dow with Rowe connected the two in 2009, and Epogee had its second chance.

University officials never had doubted that the fat substitute technology would be worth the effort. For starters it could be used in chocolate as some of the full-fat chocolate coatings on the market — think some doughnut coatings — leave a lot to be desired and deliver far more calories.

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“We knew it has potential for great market uptake,” Glasscock said. “I was mainly attracted to the possibilities in chocolate, and Olestra couldn’t make that jump. … Jeepers, if you could actually take chocolate and take the caloric count of a Snickers bar way down without sacrificing taste, that’s got to be a barn burner.”

Choco Finesse received the technology from Kansas State in return for some equity and a royalty agreement, Glasscock said.

The information Rowe received from Kansas State was more than a decade old. Now the question became whether technology had progressed in that time to allow for a better way of manufacturing the product. Rowe convinced several people originally involved with developing Epogee to return on a consultant basis to help bring the compound back to life.

Over time, Rowe refined Epogee, which has the consistency and look of Crisco. The Food and Drug Administration has given it the designation of generally regarded as safe for use in candies, baked goods, pasta, frozen desserts, spreads, sauce and nut butters. Rowe is working on getting approval for its use in fried foods such as potato chips.

A few weeks ago, local chef Regina Mehallick agreed to experiment with Epogee as a favor to Rowe, a longtime friend. She swapped it in for two recipes where she would normally use lard or butter, baking a batch of brownies and one of cheddar cheese biscuits.

The fat substitute performed well, resulting in baked goods almost indistinguishable from those made with the real thing, said Mehallick, owner of the R2Go Specialty Market.

The only downside? The cheddar cheese biscuits were not quite as buttery as normal, but they had no heavy aftertaste or anything else one might expect.

Still, she said, the biscuits and brownies she made were all eaten.

“For the purpose of research, it worked out very well,” she said.

Call IndyStar staff reporter Shari Rudavsky at (317) 444-6354. Follow her on Twitter: @srudavsky.