COLOURINGS
T
o meet one of the key consumer interests – elevating the everyday – there is a growing interest in creating products and brands that provide powerful and emotional experiences. In today’s connected online world, experiences for
some consumers gain value if they are sharable. For example, over 50% of Chinese consumers share food
and drink information on social media. This can be a visual of their own cooking, recipes, or foods they consume. Meanwhile in South Africa and Mexico, one-third of consumers do the same thing, according to Mintel’s Global Food Trends 2021. Offering unique and/or colourful confectionery, can therefore be
a perfect enabler to become ‘share-worthy’ creating further product interest – in countries such as Mexico, Spain, and the US, one-third of consumers admit to trying a new food or drink product that they discovered on social media. When it comes to food from nature, all facets of reds, oranges, yellows, or greens are available. Blue, however, is not so commonly found. Even blueberries are not truly blue. Instead, they have more of a deep purple shade coming from a natural colourant named anthocyanins.
A challenging shade
In the world of manufactured foods blue is a colour that certainly attracts attention. From a formulation standpoint, it has historically been a challenging shade to achieve with natural food colours. In some confectionery products, manufacturers may still decide to reach the desired blue colour shades using artificial colouring solutions such as Blue #1, namely Brilliant Blue. With the ongoing global trend towards more natural ingredients, many manufacturers, however, prefer to opt for a natural blue colouring solution based on spirulina, a blue-green algae that contains a number of beneficial nutrients. The use of spirulina-based colouring solutions in the food and beverage industry perfectly meets consumers’ desire for more ingredients from natural origin.
KennedysConfection.com In Europe, where the
majority of confectionery launches contain non-artificial colouring, the usage of spirulina-based colouring now accounts for 21% of coloured sugar and gum confectionery launches in 2020, according to Mintel. However, while spirulina-based food colouring can provide bright sky-blue shades, it also poses two challenges – heat stability and low-pH environments. Both parameters in combination ‘double the trouble’ and can result in undesirable effects such as poor colour stability or precipitation. With Sensient’s focus on delivering high-performance colouring solutions combined with innovative formulations that work perfectly in confectionery products, the R&D team has extended its portfolio of spirulina algae-based Marine Blue options which work well in jelly sweets and hard-boiled candy with neutral pH. Think of concepts such as cool mint, fresh breeze, ice or glacier candy, and more! These Marine Blue solutions are said achieve vibrant and deep blue colour shades to enable confectionery products to stand out: Sensient’s Avalanche MB is a mineral based alternative to titanium
dioxide and is compliant in many regions across the globe. For more flexibility, Sensient’s Marine Blue can also be used in custom blends to cover a broader colour spectrum. Equally, confectionery manufacturers can now achieve custom blues, greens, and purple shades in both transparent or cloudy form with natural solutions that can impart colour into food and beverage products.
Kennedy’s Confection December 2021 29
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