Call it sugar lite.

Nestlé, the international food behemoth, announced Wednesday that it had developed a way of restructuring sugar, allowing the company to reduce the amount of sugar in its candy products.

“It is sugar, but it is assembled differently so it can disassemble easily in your mouth with less going into your gastrointestinal tract,” said Dr. Stefan Catsicas, the company’s chief technology officer.

Nestlé declined to fully explain the process, because the company is pursuing patents for it. But Dr. Catsicas compared a normal crystal of sugar to a shoe box, where the box is made of sugar and everything inside it is also made of sugar. The new sugar, he said, will be processed to have the same sugar exterior — though it may be a globe instead of a box — to dissolve in the mouth. Because less sugar is inside, less goes to the stomach.

Nestlé said the new sugar would be introduced in products starting in 2018, and that more details about it would be released next year.