The Chr. Hansen group has launched 2 new clean label (natural) food colors for the industry – a unique stable liquid blue and bright yellow derived from turmeric.
Its latest blue has strong application for hard candy and lozenges, as blue is a popular color for fruit flavors like blueberry and raspberry, and are applied into fun flavors like bubble gum and mint lozenges with flavors like wintergreen and cool mint.
According to Chr. Hansen, blue, however, is extremely scarce in the natural color palette and there is only one globally accepted natural source of blue color, derived from spirulina, also well-known as a super food.
Stable in many applications, standard spirulina formulations meet their match in the tough production conditions of boiled candy. If manufacturers with global ambitions cannot use spirulina, their only option may be artificial colors.
This technical challenge of protecting the blue color during the boiling process of the hot candy is now solved with Chr.Hansen’s global launch of FruitMax®Blue 1506 WS. “Some of the best spirulina-based products, until now, needed to be pre-dispersed at production, which can be messy, difficult and inefficient for the producers,” said Lotte Jeppesen, Global Industry Business Manager, Confectionery. Jeppesen said there is a built-up demand for this new product as it is an easy and convenient solution for all types of boiled sweets, and it performs well in both sugar-free and sugar-based applications. Hard candy is perhaps the most price-sensitive confectionery category. Even then, consumers are increasingly wanting natural and healthy ingredients in even their most indulgent moments. She added that this new patent-pending solution will also appeal to the health conscious particularly in its use in lozenges using natural ingredients like menthol.
Another recent development is FruitMax® Yellow 1000 WSS, a bright yellow food color derived from turmeric that can be used across many applications such as confectionery, ice cream, snacks and bakery amongst others.
Here, special attention was given to minimising the off-taste that accompany turmeric. Turmeric is an extremely popular ingredient across many cultures due to its functional health properties, and consumers will like to see it on product ingredient labels. Turmeric has also been traditionally used as a natural color and flavor. According to Mintel, between 2017 to 2019, the use of turmeric had grown by 7% in Europe alone.
The new product is suitable for a wide variety of non-transparent packaged foods, as turmeric is well-known for light sensitivity.
“We have tested the stability of FruitMax Yellow 1000 WSS extensively, and are very pleased with the outcome. There are many good applications for this product, but ice cream, hard candy, brioche and extruded snacks come to mind as particularly suitable as the color is very robust to hard temperatures. We look forward to introducing our new FruitMax® Yellow to the market,” said Jerome Raudin, Director, Global Marketing.
FruitMax Yellow 1000 WSS is likely to find its core markets in Europe, Latin America and APAC. It is fully compliant with the EU Coloring foodstuffs guidelines, and is a clean label color that can be listed as turmeric extract. Yellow is the most-used color in many applications, both to produce yellow but also as a blend to make green and orange and as a color brightener. Mintel reported that turmeric was used in 49% of all the yellow color additives used in new product launches from 2017 to 2019 in Europe.
Turmeric is one of the few raw materials that produce a bright yellow color, apart from safflower. Many natural colors like beta-carotene and even orange carrot tend to make warmer tones.
Chr. Hansen is a leading, global bioscience company that develops natural solutions for the food, nutritional, pharmaceutical and agricultural industries. It produces cultures, enzymes, probiotics and natural colors for a rich variety of foods, confectionery, beverages, dietary supplements, animal feed, and plant protection.
