Five minutes at FI Europe  with … 

Dr. Roland Beck – Managing Director of Sensient Colors Europe GmbH

Agro-Food Industry Hi-Tech: Natural vs artificial: what is the future of food coloring for Sensient?

Roland Beck: The global trend is towards more natural, sustainable, innovative colouring solutions and Sensient recognises this in its consistent efforts to successfully bring an ever widening range of bright, effective and stable products to the marketplace.

Sensient, for example, pioneered the creation of palm-free natural colours enabling customers to completely avoid the need to use palm oil based colours. Sensient has worked consistently to expand this colour portfolio across a wide range of different applications. The palm-free range focuses on using a novel selection of exclusively palm-free components, chosen through a dedicated research program to ensure improved stability. The latest extensions to this range include new green and yellow shades offering proven performance in especially demanding beverage applications, as well as confectionery, dairy and savoury products. We developed proprietary emulsification systems which are based on renewable European-grown fat sources and no longer use any palm oil types of materials, a very significant step forward in the palm-free natural colours area.

AF: It looks like there is a shift from TiO2 towards calcium carbonate. What are the advantages and the challenges?

RB: Titanium dioxide replacement is really a major issue for the industry. Titanium dioxide by itself is a wonderful food additive, it does exactly what it needs to do and it’s brilliantly white. It is inert to almost anything, therefore any sort of replacement will need to make compromises or be limited to certain applications. Achieving a true white without using titanium dioxide, has thus always been a real challenge, but with more people now looking for an alternative product, Sensient has launched AvalancheTM – the new white. There can be no universal titanium dioxide replacement so any replacement has to be very specific to a particular application. With the innovative AvalancheTM range we have developed products that successfully target several different applications. This global portfolio of alternatives to titanium dioxide offer strong whitening or opacifying effects, performing well in a range of applications including confectionery, instant drinks, sauces and pet food.

AF: What innovations are you showing at the FIE 2017?

RB: At FiE in Frankfurt this year Sensient demonstrated its commitment to innovation in colour across the full spectrum, through offering colouring solutions with enhanced benefits for both customers and consumers alike: Beside the new variety in Colouring Foods and the AvalancheTM range as mentioned above, we have showed our new colour palette of  Palm-free colours.

AF: Can the future of food be both clean label and colourful?

RB: Yes. Colouring foods have become the logical next step in providing natural products to meet the consumer demand for clean labelling. The challenge has been to develop a full range of truly vibrant, effective colouring products for the market which also enable the use of end product labels that meet the consumers’ requirement for minimal labelling. Sensient meets this challenge and has further extended its comprehensive colouring foods range with new yellow and orange shades including oil based pigments in colouring foods, such as turmeric and paprika, which for a time were not possible to obtain as a colouring food. Combined with last year’s successful launches of orange, yellow, red and pink shades, as well as a natural brown, these new colouring foods all naturally comply with the EU Guidance Notes offering yet again improved application performance.

AF: What can we expect in the next year from Sensient Colors?

RB: As we go into next year our drive is to extend both the wide range of natural colouring solutions and improve the performance in the applications in which they can be successfully used. This remains a constant challenge for us, for which the awareness of latest market trends and the close cooperation with our customers is the key to understanding real needs and delivering the products to meet the growingly sophisticated demands of consumers in the 21st Century.