A Sustainable Solution for Natural Food Coloring
Food colorants are integral to product development. Food and beverage color is essential to consumer appeal, influencing visual and taste perceptions. These additives replace natural color loss during food processing or enhance natural shades to make products look healthier and more appetizing. Colorants can be synthetic or natural and come in pastes, gels, powders, and liquids to accommodate various applications.
Synthetic and Natural Food Colorants?
Synthetic options often include petroleum-based chemicals and offer a broad selection of vivid colors, including artificial hues. The USA Food and Drug Administration (FDA) usually regulates these color additives. Once approved for safety, the color additives are certified and assigned a food, drug, and cosmetic (FD & C) number.
Colorants are derived from natural sources. These include fruits and vegetables, spices, flowers and other plant materials, minerals, charcoal, and even cephalopod ink, such as squid and cuttlefish. Common examples include yellow curcumin extracts from turmeric, green chlorophylls from spinach or blue-green from spirulina, red from beet juice, brown from caramel, and black from activated charcoal.
Other processed colorants include orange from carotenoids in carrots, orange-red annatto from achiote tree seeds, and red cochineal-carmine – from the wings of the cochineal beetle. Red, blue, and purple anthocyanins come from fruits and vegetables such as grapes, berries, cabbage, and purple potatoes.
Recently, artificially made colorings have come under scrutiny with a consumer shift from synthetic to more natural, less harmful additives. In response, increasing numbers of manufacturers rely on healthier, natural alternatives.
Why Choose Natural Extracts Over Synthetic Color Additives?
Synthetic food dyes, even those that are FDA-certified, come with strict regulations and guidelines for accurate product labeling and safe consumption ratios. While cheaper to produce and more stable than natural alternatives, specific artificial colorants, notably Yellow 5 and Red 40, may contain known carcinogenic contaminants. These toxins – benzidine, 4-aminobiphenyl, and 4-amino azobenzene, have prompted concern among manufacturers and consumers as potentially causing cancer1.
Additionally, increasingly health-conscious consumers prefer less processed, purer ingredients, demanding fewer or no unnecessary additives. Personal and environmental health concerns drive this clean-label movement.
Beyond adding vibrant color to products, natural food dyes offer therapeutic effects, including anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, antioxidant, and anticancer benefits. Producing natural additives is also more eco-friendly, introducing fewer toxins into the environment and placing less burden on resources, warranting reduced water and energy consumption, sustainability, and ethics.
Natural color options are also likely to be safer in even substantial amounts and less allergenic. In addition, natural sources can be used individually or combined to create an enormous range of colors. As a result, natural food dyes command the majority share – 65% to 67% – of the food colorant market, valued at US $4.35 billion in 2022 and expected to increase to US $6.09 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.93%2. Growing within the market are plant-based options.
Plant-Based Color Extracts
Fruits, vegetables, herbs, and spices dominate natural food dyes, including strawberries, cranberries, raspberries, blueberries, pomegranate, tomato, carrots, basil, parsley, matcha, black tea, paprika, saffron, cocoa, and coffee.
Why choose plant-based additives? In line with the burgeoning demand for plant-based products and sources globally, the plant-based food coloring market was worth US $9.65 billion in 2023 and predicted to reach US $15.31 billion by 2032.
So, embrace the healthful bioactives and rainbow-colored world of plants to enrich your portfolio and pocket while being kinder to the planet. Rely on Advanced Biotech’s pure and natural flavor and aroma ingredients to mask, add, and enhance profiles.
Advanced Biotech’s Extracts – The Perfect Partner to Natural Flavor and Odor Profiles
Browse our comprehensive taste and aroma ingredients range to select 100% natural, concentrated, and EU-certified flavor and scent enhancers. We offer distillates, oleoresins, pyrazines, thiazoles, and numerous other pure, organic, and plant-based extracts. Contact us today to request free samples or place your order.
1 https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/food-dyes
2 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/food-color-market