The Future of Colorful Food: Dairy Products will become the Main Battlefield of Natural Colors Innovation

"Consumers are seeking dairy products with natural, authentic colors. "

Dairy foods consumers have flavor and color expectations. Strawberry milk should be a bright red hue while blueberry yogurt needs to be deep blue. Nacho sauce must look cheesy orange while butter spread is golden yellow.

“In today’s visually centric world, color is equally, if not more important than flavor,” said Megan Longhi, dairy technical service manager, Sensient Food Colors, St. Louis. “Social media has us seeing color in new and exciting ways, like the recent Starbucks Unicorn Frappuccino.”Coloring has been used to enhance food and beverage appearance for more than 2,000 years, with use dating back to when vintners manipulated grape skins and other fruits to achieve desirable colors in wine, according to the International Food Information Council Foundation, Washington. Color has already been important because consumers eat and drink first with their eyes and then with their stomachs."Social media has created a buzz around colorful products, such as the Starbucks Unicorn Frappuccino. "

Food colors perform many functions. They help to correct for color loss due to exposure to light, air, temperature extremes, moisture and storage conditions. They also assist with correcting natural variations in color and may enhance colors that occur naturally in foods. Lastly, they provide color to colorless foods, rendering them more eye appealing.
Overcoming color challenges

For more than 125 years, U.S. food and beverage manufacturers have had a tool box of food colors — both artificial and those perceived as natural — available for use. The colors are carefully regulated and often reviewed to ensure safety. Both categories of colors are widely used, with natural colors gaining traction, especially in minimally processed and simple dairy foods.

“Dairy products come with a range of unique coloring challenges,” said Christiane Lippert, head of marketing — food, Lycored, Switzerland. “Some colors don’t interact well with high-fat recipe systems. Others can be affected by pH. Probably the biggest challenges, however, come from manufacturing and storage conditions. Many dairy applications expose colors to extreme temperatures, as well as ultraviolet light, which a lot of colorants can’t withstand.”

This is something processors who are exploring clear packaging — glass or plastic — are learning. The trend is to use clear packaging to showcase the product to the consumer, but ensuring desirable color over the course of a product’s shelf life is not easy.

“For example, yogurt packaged in clear cups, especially fruit-on-the-bottom products, can be a challenge to color because of light exposure and color migration,” said Brianna Fyock, applications scientist, Chr. Hansen Inc., Milwaukee. “Turmeric is very light sensitive, thus if a customer is looking for a natural yellow color for a product in clear packaging, I would recommend encapsulated turmeric, a yellow beta-carotene or an orange carrot, all of which have very good light stability.”

Color migration must also be managed. The color in the fruit on the bottom should not move into the white mass on top.

“We know that water-soluble colors have a tendency to migrate between levels of a layered product,” Ms. Fyock said. “This is especially an issue with red and purple fruit preps.”

A better option may be water-soluble emulsions or suspensions, and encapsulated colors. Processors need to be aware that depending on the formulation, there may still be some color migration. This is true for most viscous refrigerated dairy products, including cottage cheese, fromage frais, pudding and quark.

DDW-The Color House, Louisville, Ky., manufactures carotenoid emulsions. The natural colors may help reduce or eliminate the amount of color migration from fruit prep into yogurt.

“Colors sourced as oil soluble are converted into water-dispersible emulsions,” said Jody Renner-Nantz, applications manager. “We produce emulsions that are transparent, including beta-carotene and paprika.” 

Adding authenticity to the equation

Seeing is tasting when it comes to food. Hence, authentic, true-to-nature color is a priority for many dairy processors. Artificial colors, those based on petroleum and in the United States, known as certified colors, historically have been very cost effective and stable in most dairy systems; however, they may be too colorful in some applications, suggesting to consumers that the application is overly processed. This is particularly true for inherently simple dairy foods such as flavored milk and yogurt.

Last year, Lycored set out to explore the strength of consumer demand for natural colors within the specific context of the dairy industry, and with particular focus on strawberry-flavored milk. The study asked mothers in the United States to evaluate the visual appearance of flavored milks colored red naturally versus artificially.

The company tested the stability of two of its natural tomato-based colors versus the artificial colorant Red No. 3 during and after ultra-high temperature (U.H.T.) processing in a flavored milk drink matrix. Accelerated shelf life tests were carried out to evaluate the stability of the colors when exposed to light, dark and ambient conditions, simulating real-life storage, transportation and retail environments.

When consumers were asked to rate the naturalness of the appearance of the three samples, both of the tomato-based colored milks outscored the artificial sample. Then they were asked if they would be willing to pay more for a product with natural flavorings and colors. Eighty-eight per cent said they would.

They were told that the average flavored milk beverage costs $1.50 and asked how much they would be willing to spend on a product if it was made with natural colors and flavors. On average, moms said they would pay up to $2.20, which is 47% more.

In focus groups, mothers were asked about the three colored strawberry milks. Comments on the milks with tomato-based color included: “Looks the most natural to a blended strawberry, therefore potentially most healthy for my children,” “Reminds me of a drink from my childhood…and more likely to appear in nature” and “more attractive to the mom in me. I believe it looks like it has less artificial ingredients in it.”

The focus groups suggested there is a “feel-good factor” from buying their children a product that looks more homemade. Other feedback indicated that consumers are turning away from non-natural colors that are too vibrant.

“We also subjected our natural reds from lycopene to four different U.H.T. process technologies: steam injection, plate, tubular and infusion, including homogenization both upstream and downstream,” Ms. Lippert said. “In many of these processes the recipe is heated at very high temperatures, for example in our direct steam injection trial, which is considered the most harsh of all U.H.T. processing types, the product was heated above 145 degrees C (293 F) and held in direct steam for more than five seconds. The samples with our tomato lycopene retained their color exceptionally well, in fact, much better than those colored with the artificial colorant.”

Another natural option for strawberry milk and similar products is Sensient’s heat-stable vegetable juice. It delivers vivid red shades at a neutral pH and stands up to heat at low usage rates, according to the company. Though natural red is challenging to maintain in heat, blues and greens are the most challenging in U.H.T. dairy applications due to heat sensitivities and high water activity.

“Spirulina, a common blue source, is sensitive to heat, and the color will not survive,” Ms. Longhi said. “You need a stable blue foundation to achieve green, so without it, your color portfolio is limited.”

Sensient recently introduced a pH and heat-stable blue that fills a significant shade gap in the natural color spectrum. It is stable across a wide pH range, from 3.0 to 7.0, and can be used to create greens and intense purples, too.

The colors are promising for yogurt, which Ms. Longhi believes is a category with a lot of opportunity to get creative with color.

“Social media provides us the ability to share anything, especially photos of foods that are visually interesting,” she said. “This includes bold colors, surprising color combinations and even different color effects, such as shimmer. Limited-time colorful offerings in the yogurt category are a great way to delight consumers and provide them an ‘Instagrammable’ opportunity.”

While this is one approach to using colors in yogurt, another is to add authenticity. For example, Lycored just concluded studies using its natural tomato-based and beta-carotene colors in fruit preparations in yogurts. Results showed that the range of shades available is true to the fruit in terms of authenticity, which is key for consumer likeability.

“The ingredients also remained color-fast in accelerated shelf life tests, even under light conditions more extreme than typical retail lighting conditions,” Ms. Lippert said. “By contrast, there were problems with the samples colored with different natural colorants. For example, migration is a real issue for carmine-based coloring in strawberry yogurt, which impacts the quality and freshness perception of a layered yogurt on shelf.”

The study included evaluation under industrial-scale conditions. Results showed the colorants were process stable, even when subjected to high heat levels for more than 30 minutes.

Flavor's effect on color

Formulators must be aware that flavors may impact natural color stability. This is particularly true with products containing fruit preps.

“Flavors can degrade certain pigments or breakdown emulsions and encapsulations,” Ms. Fyock said. “This is due to certain reactive carriers and solvents. Reactions between color and flavors are unpredictable. Degradation can happen immediately or slowly over time. Therefore, we recommend that the color and flavor be added separately; with the flavor added first and mixed in completely before the color is added.”

Process cheese, in its many forms, including sauces, shreds and slices, is another dairy foods category with unique coloring challenges. Most process cheeses rely on oil-soluble colorings, including beta-carotene, annatto extract and paprika oleoresin to obtain a desirable cheesy orange hue. That hue is jeopardized by numerous processing variables.

“Various factors contribute to the pinking of process cheese,” she said. “This includes high-heat exposure during processing and slow cooling of loaves. Buildup of cheese on the sides of batch cookers or in the piping can also be deleterious to color.”

Additional considerations to prevent pinking include the other ingredients in the formula and the order they are added to the batch. Age and type of cheese, along with emulsifying salts may impact color, too.

“The future of dairy colors is natural,” Ms. Lippert said. “It’s also about safety and traceability. It’s also about allowing for more transparency and trust for the consumer. This includes being able to see a product in clear packaging on a shelf so they can judge the deliciousness of the product.”

The good news is natural colors may be just as stable as synthetic alternatives.

“The main request in the dairy category is color from botanical sources, so one might say the power of nature is trending,” Ms. Longhi said. “With today’s advanced technologies and sourcing capabilities, the performance gap between artificial colors and natural colors is pretty much closed for almost all shades.”

Disclaimer:

• This article was first published by Donna Berry with the title of The power of color in product development on Food Business News.

• All images from: Food Business News.