A colorful palatte of options

By Jessica Jacobsen
Excerpts from Beverage Industry magazine, November 2011 pp 49 – 54

Color trends address natural demands, stability concerns.

For beverages, colors can play a crucial role when it comes to shelf appeal. They can help grab a consumer’s attention as well as correspond to the flavor and branding of a beverage. In addition, as beverage-makers seek more natural ingredients to be able to provide clean label statements, the search for colors that can deliver on all of those requests has helped spark innovation among ingredient suppliers.

Even though some ingredient suppliers say that synthetic color demands do not seem to be increasing, a market still remains. “I think there is still demand for artificial colors, particularly … [for] existing products,” says Campbell Barnum, vice president of branding and market development with D.D. Williamson, Louisville, Ky. “But I do think that natural color has been growing 5 to 10 percent a year in the past few years in North America and synthetic color demand has been pretty flat, just from a total dollar perspective. The food and beverage industry has been growing, but artificial color demand has been flat, so natural colors have enjoyed the growth in the beverage industry.”
The regulations with synthetic dyes in Europe are an example of the replacement aspect of formulation, says Jason Armao, director of application and innovation with D.D. Williamson. Although D.D. Williamson says it is seeing the switch to naturally derived colors, in the United States, those requests are more common for initial products and not reformulations.
“A lot of those [requests] are coming from product line extensions or creating new products,” Barnum says. “In some cases, it is reformulating products. A lot of it is, ‘I’m used to dealing with synthetic color, but for this product I’d like to try the natural alternatives.’ Sometimes we get the other, but it’s a lot more challenging to reformulate and match exact characteristics.”

Stabilized offerings

D.D.Williamson says improvements with technology have aided in making emulsion colors and improved efficiencies with extraction techniques.

Although working with naturally derived colors can present some technical challenges,suppliers recognize how far the market and technology has come. “I think the technology involved with producing the natural colors, for example emulsions, has come a long way in the last several years,” D.D. Williamson’s Armao says. “There’s new technology being employed with making emulsion colors and there’s improved efficiencies with extraction techniques.”
Armao adds that yields related to crops and other agricultural issues can result in more consistent products. That, coupled with the technology used to produce colors, has helped improve the functionality and performance of different colors.
“A perfect example in beverages would be emulsion colors. You can take beta carotene, which is oil soluble, and make it water soluble using emulsion technology,” he says. “Even going beyond that, emulsions can be made clear or cloudy. So if you’re putting a yellow color into a beverage, instead of it looking cloudy like juice, now you can have something more clear, which when you think about the enhanced water category, it kind of fits; you want the water to be colored, yet still be clear and not have a cloudy appearance.”
D.D. Williamson also has seen a sudden surge in demand for its flavored Caramelized Sugar 830 and Caramelized Apple 810, which launched a couple of years ago. The natural flavors provide incidental coloring, Barnum says. The Caramelized Sugar offers a characteristic flavor of burnt sugar and is stable in phosphoric acid, citric acid, up to 60 percent alcohol and 15 percent salt applications, he adds.
The company’s Caramelized Apple flavor, which can be used in ciders and other apple drinks, enables the beverage to state “100 percent apple” on a product display panel. This is important for beverage companies, he says. The ingredient also can be labeled as “caramelized apple juice concentrate” or “natural flavor,” the company says.