Formulating natural colors in dairy foods

Starbucks probably thought it was doing the right thing by coloring its Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino with carmine. After all, even if consumers didn’t realize it when they ordered the popular dairy-berry beverage from their friendly neighborhood barista, the coffee giant had them in mind in opting for this natural colorant over a synthetic like, say, FD&C Red #40.

But as Starbucks soon learned, not all natural colors are created equal. Yes, the Food and Drug Administration exempts carmine red (also called cochineal extract) from the FD&C certification process that governs manmade food colorants. And, yes, carmine is derived from an all-natural source. But that all-natural source happens to be the pulverized body of a pregnant Latin American beetle.

Minor detail, of course, but when it went viral earlier this year, it caused a major maelstrom. Never mind that carmine has a long track record as a safe and effective red colorant. Vegetarians and adherents to kosher and halal dietary restrictions — not to mention the insect-averse — felt duped upon learning that a drink they thought played by their rules simply didn’t.

But there’s a happy ending to this story. For if “Frappucino-gate” illustrates the complexity of coloring dairy products naturally, it also shows how today’s color industry is improving the range of naturally derived colorants designed to do just that. After all, not long after the controversy erupted, Starbucks found a suitable solution to its coloring conundrum. With an appreciation of coloring regulations and the unique properties of dairy, so can you.

Force of nature

The shift away from synthetic, petroleum-based azo colorants has been a force of nature in the food and beverage industry for some time now. As Joseph Moritz, product manager, human nutrition, BASF Corp., Florham Park, N.J., noted, “Recent events in the United States and Europe have focused more negative attention” on certified colorant options.

For example, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in 2010 slapped warning labels on the synthetic colorants known as the “Southampton Six,” responding to a widely publicized British study that implicated the ingredients in causing hyperactivity in children. Stateside, media coverage of FDA food color advisory panel hearings in 2011 gave Americans an eye into how their own safety watchdogs viewed the hyperactivity research. Though the panel ultimately ruled out warning labels on synthetics for now, it “voted that certain children may be susceptible to them, and further research is necessary,” Moritz said.

That less-than-full-throated endorsement echoes broader uneasiness — especially among parents — about colorants pegged to vaguely ominous FD&C numbers. Those numbers, listed along with the colorants themselves in Title 21 Section 74 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), merely indicate that FDA has certified the compounds for use in foods, drugs and cosmetics. But consumers still find them a little foreboding — if not outright creepy — and that apprehension helps explain why the colors just aren’t as welcome in foods as they used to be.

It’s important to note that manufacturers have used FD&C colors to produce safe and stable hues in foods and beverages for over a century. Even so, perception is reality, and a 2011 Nielsen survey commissioned by ingredient supplier Chr. Hansen revealed that 92% of consumers in 10 countries admit to concern about artificial colorants, and 88% express a preference for natural.

So “instead of waiting for more scientific findings and regulatory action,” Moritz said, “major food manufacturers are asking for options.” Citing data from a 2011 Beverage Industry new product development survey, he notes that “more than 90% of drink developers say they will be using at least some natural flavors/colors this year.”   

Exemption to the rules

The CFR lays out a clear definition of what natural flavors are, but it’s mum on the topic of natural colors. Rather, the closest it comes to defining natural colors is in 21 CFR 73, where it identifies those color additives exempt from FD&C certification. These include a handful of label-friendly fruit and vegetable juices extracted from carrots, elderberries, beets and the like; spices and spice derivatives like turmeric and annatto; all four classes of caramel color; the carotenoid pigments lycopene and beta carotene; and a host of others that wind up on the list as FDA issues premarket approvals through its Color Additive Petition (CAP) process.

Label readers might recognize many of these as ostensibly natural ingredients — and the colorants in fact may come from natural sources. But according to the Code, products still must identify them as added color and cannot describe them as natural unless they occur naturally in the product they’re coloring. In other words, beet juice may appear as a natural color in ice cream, but only if the ice cream is made with beets. And unless you’re a hipster chef in San Francisco or Brooklyn, you’re probably not making beet ice cream.

All of which adds to the uncertainty over what a natural color really is. Moreover, as Stefan Hake, CEO of GNT USA Inc., Tarrytown, N.Y., said, “Based on the consumer perception of ‘natural,’ clear distinctions exist among colorants within the exempt category.” One need look no further than carmine, he said, which is an exempt color, but, “like many other exempts, is processed with organic solvents and, perhaps most damningly, derived from an insect.”

Given these nuances, “We must acknowledge what consumers believe to be ‘natural,’” Hake concluded. On the safe side, “Fruit and vegetable juice colors, which are physically processed with water, clearly offer today’s consumer what they are looking for in a natural color,” he said. “As the field of ‘exempt’ colors widens every day, understanding these distinctions in content and processing will serve a critical role.”

Label-friendly with benefits

That role may be even more critical in the dairy category, where even indulgences like ice cream and milkshakes can convey a healthful aura. According to Jody Renner-Nantz, global applications scientist, D.D. Williamson, Louisville, Ky., “A lot of nutrition studies are coming out about the benefits of dairy.” The buzz on everything from probiotics to chocolate milk as a recovery beverage has landed the category in a good-for-you spotlight. As a result, she said, “I think it’s natural to couple those benefits with good-for-you ingredients like naturally derived colors.”

In some cases, the right colorant can even brighten dairy’s health halo. Consider that the body converts beta carotene — a familiar exempt colorant — to vitamin A. As Todd Katz, food and beverage applications lab manager, DSM Nutritional Products, Parsippany, N.J., pointed out, 1 milligram of beta carotene delivers 1,667 IUs (International Units) of vitamin A activity.

“When used for coloration, a product may need up to 10 milligrams per liter of beta carotene crystal. In a beverage with a standard 240-milliliter serving size, this would deliver 4,000 IUs, or 80% of the daily value.” Importantly, Katz noted, beta carotene must appear on the label as either a colorant or the nutrient pro-vitamin A, but not both.

Choosing the most label-friendly ingredient might be the easiest part of the process; milk is a finicky medium to color. Everything, from the background shade to inherent chemistry, complicates the coloring challenge.

First of all, Renner-Nantz said, “Milk, obviously, is white. And that tends to flush out the color.” Her general solution is to “overdose a little on the color” when overcoming a white background or, as in the case of caramel, which tends to appear grayish in dairy beverages, to “combine different colors — maybe a caramel with a lycopene — to give more of a red hue in a chocolate product, to give it more depth.”

Then there’s the issue of the dairy matrix itself. Chad Ford, product manager of colors, Wild Flavors Inc., Erlanger, Ky., said, “It can be difficult to apply coloring to an application with a high fat content or one that requires high-heat processing.” UHT treatment in particular is especially damaging to exempt colors.

And even if dairy’s refrigerated storage can prolong colorant life, it may also let formulators add more “stuff” to the product mix.

“A refrigerated product has more actives going on inside,” said Rodger Jonas, director of national sales, P.L. Thomas Inc., Morristown, N.J. “There could be probiotics, functional ingredients — there’s a lot more variability going on. There are a lot more things interacting with the colorant.”

No more paint-by-numbers

Such hurdles were no match for certified colors, which made coloring dairy products almost a “paint-by-number” process, Jonas said. Switching to natural, by contrast, involves a stepwise re-evaluation of the entire product and production process. “There’s no universal solution for a whole category,” he said.

Exempt colors simply aren’t as easy to work with as certified. For one, they can’t achieve the same intensity as certified options. “There is nothing like the brightness of synthetic colors, and no natural can replace them,” said Karina Bedrack, sales manager, LycoRed, Beer Sheva, Israel. “People want inexpensive exact shades of color in natural form, but that’s difficult to obtain with exempt colorants.”

What’s more, exempt colors will cost more than certified — as much as 10 to 20 times more on a cost-in-use basis, by some estimates. “The reasons for this,” said Ford, “are the costs of bringing the fruit or vegetable raw material to market versus, say, producing it in a lab. And use rates are typically higher with exempt colors, as there is more ‘stuff’ that comes along with them besides just pure pigment.”

Yet that higher price doesn’t buy more stability, as exempt colors are labile under many common dairy processing and storage conditions. “Unprotected pigments found in natural colors such as paprika, annatto, anthocyanins and carrot can degrade from exposure to heat or light,” said Carol Locey, director, product management, colors, Kalsec Inc., Kalamazoo, Mich. She added that the time/temperature conditions of heat treatment are also important to consider. “Colors with improved stability have been developed, such as Kalsec Durabrite colors.”

“In some cases, you may need to add a natural coloring at a different point than you would a certified color,” Renner-Nantz said. “For example, if you’re pasteurizing an ice cream, it’s possible that you might want to add the colors after the treatment because the heat will cause a little fading of naturally derived colors.”

Then there’s product pH and its effect on color. Though Locey said that turmeric “provides a bright yellow hue” at pH values from 2 to 7 — pretty-much covering the dairy spectrum — “certain annatto products sold as concentrates in alkaline solution can precipitate out in acidic conditions.” That’s why she advises using an acid-proof annatto when formulating, say, a yogurt.

Of course, it isn’t all downside when choosing exempt, as stability varies from colorant to colorant and condition to condition. Turmeric may fade in light but holds fairly steady at high temperatures; lycopene, paprika, annatto and carrot, for their part, are all relatively heat stable. Nevertheless, it pays not to take an exempt colorant’s staying power for granted.

Seeing red

The quirks and considerations might best be illustrated by example — which brings us back to that infamous Frappuccino. As Nathalie Pauleau Larrey, color activity manager, David Michael Europe, Valance, France, said, some of the toughest products to color naturally are dairy beverages with a strawberry flavor profile — and, therefore, a red or pink hue.

That’s because in addition to having a high water activity, such beverages are also generally neutral in pH. FD&C Red #40 works splendidly under such conditions but — alas — it is FD&C Red #40.

“Carmine gives a very stable strawberry/raspberry shade that’s perfect to replace Red #40,” Pauleau Larrey noted, but introduces objections of its own, as we’ve already seen. (Among them is carmine’s allergenicity, which prompted FDA to mandate in early 2011 that labels call it out specifically to alert potential sufferers.)

With those two options out of the running, Starbucks might’ve turned to red colorants containing anthocyanin pigments from sources like berries, red cabbage and grape skins. But while these colorants produce appealing strawberry tones similar to carmine when pH is below roughly 4.5 or 5, “the pigments they contain are unstable as pH increases,” Pauleau Larrey said. In a tangy yogurt fruit prep — where the pH is more to anthocyanins’ liking — this is no problem. But in a neutral milk-based beverage, the color may fade or turn bluish, grayish or brownish, making it a deal-breaker.

Enter the carotenoid pigment lycopene, which Starbucks chose as a substitute for carmine following Frappuccino-gate. Extracted from tomatoes, the colorant “is probably the most stable natural red with respect to temperature, and has the widest pH tolerance,” said Roee Nir, color and flavor global commercial manager at LycoRed. He claims it maintains its red tone from pH 2.8 to 8 and can withstand even HTST and UHT pasteurization.

The challenge was that lycopene tends toward the orange and yellow range of the red spectrum, but Jonas noted that manufacturers learned to alter the compound’s crystalline structure to yield a red with bluer undertones.

“You wind up blending different crystalline structures and sizes to control and modify it,” he said. The result is that the patented form of lycopene designed for the application has “opened up whole new ranges of colors that the ingredient can achieve.”

Nir is quick to note that processors can achieve the appearance of not only berries but fruits like watermelon. “For other dairy products, we can fit colors, including not just lycopene but beta carotene, too, to give a peach tone to peach yogurt, or a yellow color for pineapple. We can go well beyond berry,” he said.

Say cheese!

That’s good to know because perhaps the only other colors that get as much play in dairy as red are the orange and yellow shades of cheese and butter. Color suppliers have done yeoman’s work in delivering such colors, and have done so using mainly exempt options like beta carotene — a staple in butter — and the annatto we so often see in cheese.

But just because these colors appear frequently in dairy doesn’t mean we can take a one-size-fits-all approach to using them. Consider a processed cheese. “The alkaline, water-soluble annatto cheese color used to color natural cheese such as Cheddar and Colby cannot be used in processed cheese,” Locey said. The high levels of certain proteins in natural cheese can combine with norbixin, causing it to precipitate and generate “pinking” in the finished cheese. Locey recommends alternative formulations and notes that processed cheese is an ideal application for oil-soluble forms of annatto and paprika.

When the task is coloring a cheese powder destined for later use — in a boxed pasta dinner, for example, or as a seasoning on a snack — different considerations take center stage. Locey suggests using encapsulated colors in dry mixes requiring long shelf life, while pointing to a blend of oleoresin paprika and annatto or carrot extract to achieve the bright yellow-orange hues we associate with cheese-flavored snacks. “These products will provide a clean label and appeal to the consumer,” she said.

Renner-Nantz notes that annatto’s reliable heat stability should guard it against any damage during subsequent processing — extrusion, frying, baking or otherwise. “You could actually put the annatto into a snack matrix itself if you’d like to give it that yellow-orange appearance of Cheddar,” she said. And for more impact, she suggests a post-process application of a dry topical cheese powder for “even more of that stick-to-your-fingers quality.”

Katz has advice for those working with carotenoid colorants. The beta carotene crystal, he explained, “is sparingly soluble in oil, so it must be milled into a suspension to make it suitable for oily applications.”

 In fact, the primary delivery forms of carotenoids, like beta carotene, apocarotenal and canthaxanthin, are oily suspensions of finely milled crystals or spray-dried powders. For aqueous applications, his company supplies liquid emulsions and encapsulated carotenoids, “prepared by creating an emulsion and then spray-drying or spray-drying in cornstarch” to confer extra protection to the carotenoid colorant.

The blue and the green

Diane Hnat, senior technical marketing manager at DSM, said that dairy manufacturers can capture everything from “nuanced as well as bolder versions of yellowish-orange, to reddish-orange, ‘eggy,’ ‘salmony,’ and ‘strawberry’ shades” using carotenoids. On the other hand, she said, a blue or green dairy product “conveys a nontraditional or nonconventional combination of dairy with ‘something else’ added.”

Put another way, blue or green dairy just doesn’t seem natural. As such, it’s probably no great hardship that the only consistently high-performing blue and green colorants for dairy have been synthetic. And we might safely assume, too, that the typical consumer of a blue-raspberry frozen novelty or “slime-green” squeezable yogurt wouldn’t blanch at seeing FD&C Blue #1 on an ingredient label. (Don’t believe me? Just ask your 12-year-old son.)

But dairy formulators who aim to go green (or blue) naturally have limited options. As Marlena Hidlay, marketing manager, coloration, at DSM, said, “Many European companies have made the switch to natural sources such as spirulina, beet juice, chlorophyll or bilberry extract to achieve these bright hues. Other companies are using water-soluble anthocyanins or flavonoids with pigments that may appear red, purple or blue according to the product pH.”

But these options offer imperfect stability in dairy applications, and some, like sodium copper chlorophyllin — which FDA permits as a colorant only in dried citrus beverage mixes — offer little benefit to dairy manufacturers. Thus, Hidlay said, “Blue and green remain a challenge.”

Color suppliers aren’t giving up, though. Ford said that Wild has developed a natural, acid-stable blue color derived from fruit juice that produces “vibrant, even pastel-like” blue tones in low- and high-pH dairy environments. It comes in liquid, dry and oil-soluble forms and is ideal for flavored milk and dairy-based beverages, yogurt, frozen desserts, dairy dips and spreads.

But in time, nailing that spot-on blue or green — whether naturally or otherwise — may not be so important. “Though the progression may be slow,” Ford said, “the coloring of dairy products as a whole is leaning more towards realism.”

And, really, when was the last time you saw a blue raspberry anyway?

LycoRed’s Bedrack credits the buying public’s shift in perspective.

“Consumers’ awareness and preference for having natural colorings in their dairy foods is very important,” she said. “And because more products are popping up on shelves with natural colorants, the consumer is getting used to the fact that ‘natural’ doesn’t mean ‘bright and shiny,’ but maybe a little more cloudy and pale. It’s not always eye-catching, but it’s becoming mainstream.”

And it’s a sign that a bright future awaits colorful dairy products.