Splenda will be in short supply for food companies in the near future thanks in part by a surge in low-carb diets.

bq. Dieters hoping for a slew of new products with the sugar substitute Splenda may be disappointed next year. That’s because the maker of sucralose, the key ingredient behind the increasingly ubiquitous no-calorie sweetener, is having trouble keeping up with demand.

Tate & Lyle PLC, the world’s only manufacturer of sucralose, said interest has so outpaced expectations the company won’t take on new U.S. customers until it has doubled production at it’s plant in McIntosh, Ala., sometime in early 2006.

Splenda is busy celebrating its 5th birthday, having first been first introduced to US consumers via the internet in 1999. Today the sweetener is used in mainstream products such as Pepsi Edge that are found in 20% of American households. Here are some facts about Splenda:

* #1 brand of sweetener in US by dollar sales
* Most of the sales growth is coming out of natural sugar, which is slowly losing “market share”
* Consumers use 5 billion Splenda packets per year, or about 9,000 in the time it took to read this article

Splenda–the sugar replacement with no calories and less than one gram of carbs per teaspoon–is being used by more consumers than ever thanks to the popularity of low-carb diets. “It’s wild,” Colin Watts, McNeil’s president, said. “We’ve doubled the business within just the most recent 18 months.” Sales surpassed those of rival Equal in early 2003, and now command a 47 percent share of the U.S. sugar substitute market at retail, which is worth an estimated $1 billion.