Local, natural food colors ready for billion-dollar market

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Squash for yellow, sweet potato leaves for pink and red and ternate flowers for blue.
These natural colorants are ready for a global market worth $5 billion in 2020, said Trinidad II Arcangel, a senior science specialist at the Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI).

“Food acceptability is an interplay of different senses like taste, texture, appearance, aroma and color,” said Arcangel, a licensed chemist with degrees in food chemistry and food science from the University of Sto. Tomas. “Color is a very important factor, added to enhance the quality of food.”

Color is also used to make food more appealing and influences perceptions on taste. For example, red for many people means strawberry, blue denotes blueberry and yellow symbolized lemon or mango, sweet or sour.

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There are natural colorants and there are synthetic ones. Because of reports that some synthetic colorants are harmful to humans, potentially causing mental disorders in children, cancer and allergy in adults, food makers are now shifting to natural colorants such as chlorophyll-based natural colorants for green, anato and carotene for yellow and orange, and so on, Arcangel said during the 46th in a Seminar Series held by the FNRI every July during National Nutrition Month.

FNRI researchers Joyce Tobias, Charlie Adona, Vannizsa Ramas, Roxan Marie Francisco, Maricar Albao, Stanly Adams Jocson, Rolando Payag, Filoteo Ponte, Kimberly Viron and Jonnel dela Rosa based their study on the rice-mongo curls and rice-mongo crunchies and nutritious supplementary food developed by FNRI and used in feeding programs. Patent is pending for the research result.

The researchers did colorant extraction first. Then they tested the optimal process conditions. Standardization runs followed to establish that the process is repeatable.

Production runs were made for shelf-life studies with natural colorants applied into food products.

The food scientists looked at color values, moisture and acidity, free fatty acids and sensory factors.

“The study developed a technology for the production of natural colorants derived from locally available raw materials,” Arcangel said. “It optimized processing conditions, standardized the process, determined the colorants’ shelf-life and applied the colorants to nutritious snack foods.”

Yellow was extracted from squash, purple from sweet potato (camote) leaves and blue from ternate flowers. At the end of the day, they were able to produce a yellow liquid colorant and red powder and blue powder colorants.

“The process was optimized and standardized to come up with the most acceptable characteristics and the colorants were stored for stability study,” Arcangel said, adding the standardized colorants were used to coat steam-fried snack foods.

The shelf-life is 11 months for yellow and eight months for both red and blue colorants.

When applied to steam fried snack foods, the shelf-life for yellow was six months and three months for the red and blue.

The steam-fried snack was liked “moderately,” according to taste tests. Sensory profiles were within the acceptable values. The chemical and microbial properties of the colorants and snack foods with colorants were within the acceptable limits of good manufacturing safety standards.

They established that the blue powder, red powder and liquid yellow colorants from squash were acceptable and within safety limits. The microbial loads were within safe limits according to good manufacturing practices.

“The extraction and production process of natural colorants from local raw materials is technically feasible,” Arcangel said. The optimized natural colorants produced can be both applied to extruded and steam fried and extruded snack foods, she said.

Extruded snacks include combined ingredients that are pushed through a mold or precision cut. They include the common chicharron or pork rinds, corn puffs, veggie straw snacks or, in the FNRI research, snacks curls.

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