2. Fructose has many uses in food, pharmaceutical and other industries, and fructans, being water soluble and acid labile, would seem to be an ideal source of fructose. Unfortunately, plants rich in fructans are not easy to grow and harvest commercially and so most fructose is produced industrially from maize starch or from sucrose. Recent interest in fructans as functional foods (Robertfroid and Delzenne, 1998) has led to investigations of the feasibility of harvesting immature wheat grains (D’Egidio el ai, 1997).