Tree Top Offers Fruit Fat Substitute

Tree Top Inc., the fruit cooperative based here in the heart of orchard country, and two Connecticut entrepreneurs are offering a fruit-based fat substitute to industrial-scale bakers such as Nabisco and General Mills.

The product is JLS Dry the initials stand for Just Like Shortenin’ - and its developers hope to find a niche with baking companies looking to take advantage of the fat-free-food boom.

Unlike olestra, a fat substitute for fried salty snacks approved last week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, JLS Dry contains no artificial ingredients and does not require federal approval or warning labels.

Made from pears, apples and prunes and sold as a beige powder, JLS Dry works as a fat substitute when baked in cakes, cookies and brownies.

Peter Demers founded PlumLife Co. in Branford, Conn. with neighbor Donald Laudano three years ago.

“We give these brownies to people,” made with JLS Dry, “and they are absolutely blown away. They can’t believe they are fat-free,” Demers said Monday.

“There’s no fruit taste. It’s not like eating a fruit brownie - it’s a brownie.”

JLS Dry “not only lowers the fat, it also drops the calories about 60 percent,” Demers said. Plus “it’s got fiber - how much more of a nice story can I give you?”

None of the companies that received samples have made any commitments yet, Tree Top spokeswoman Pat Moss said Monday.

But word is getting around.

“We get a half dozen or more calls a day from bakeries” that have heard about JLS Dry, Demers said, noting a call Monday from Japan and one last week from Dubai.

The product’s development began in December 1992 in Demer’s Connecticut kitchen.

Demers, then working for publisher McGraw Hill, had read that prune puree could be used in baking as a replacement for butter, margarine or shortening.

So he bought a box of prunes, boiled them and threw them in the blender. He baked brownies using the puree instead of shortening, and they tasted great.

When he found the puree was not available in grocery stores, “I thought this was a good idea for a business.”

So he and Laudano formed PlumLife. They began offering their product to baking companies in May 1993.

The partners initially contacted Tree Top looking for someone to make their product on the West Coast, said Ray Dilschneider, vice president of Tree Top’s industrial division. Tree Top’s main products are fruit juice and apple sauce, but is has been making fruit powders for several years.

Demers estimated the low-fat and no-fat segment of baked goods is a $12 billion to $15 billion annual market. The market for the ingredients in those products is $300 million to $500 million a year, he said.