“An important milestone for the food industry …” FDA approves Sensients “exceptionally heat-stable” natural blue food coloring made from butterfly pea flowers

The “exceptionally heat stable“Color can be used in a variety of applications including alcoholic beverages, sports drinks, carbonated soft drinks, fruit beverages, coffee creamer, ice cream and frozen milk desserts, fruit preparations in yogurt, chewing gum, coated nuts and candy, the empathic global marketing director David Rigg told FoodNavigg -UNITED STATES.

“This is a very big deal because the approval of color additives is like rare birds and it doesn’t happen very often.”

While Sensient has in the past supplied the blue color to a small number of customers as vegetable juice, the official thumbs upas a coloring additive from the FDA will give larger food and beverage companies the confidence to use it, he said.

“We still think it would be considered a vegetable juice under the Code of Federal Regulations. But in 2018 we decided to submit a petition for color additives. “

Other sources of natural blue color

Right now when it comes to natural blues – which can be used as blues, but also as building blocks to create natural greens and purples in combination with other natural colors – US formulators don’t have a lot of options, Rigg said.

According to the FDA performOf the currently examined petitions for color additive, Ecoflora SAS recently submitted a Petition for color additionFor a natural blue from jagua, a tropical fruit also known as huito; during a petitionIs also in the works to obtain approval for natural blue from gardenia fruit. A third petitionWas also recently registered for a blue color from a species of algae called Galdieria sulphuraria.

While spirulina extract was approved as a blue food coloring for sweets and chewing gum in 2013, in a far broader range of applications in 2014, It “does not have the same heat stability” As butterfly pea flower, and “not very good for applications with high water activity such as drinks “,he claimed.

“It’s a bit frustrating for the entire industry that there isn’t a more streamlined process for approving new natural colors.” Added Rigg, who said it took three years for the FDA to give the butterfly pea flower extract its thumbs up.

Impossible Foods, which at a similar time (late 2018) submitted a petition for color additive, got the green light just a few months laterIn July 2019, with the move of the FDA to “Speed ​​of Light“Rigg said, although this may have been explained by the fact that the agency had already checked much of the same data in the company records.” GRAS notification for the same ingredient,he speculated.

An incredibly vibrant shade of denim blue ‘

So what does butterfly pea blossom blue work with?

The water-soluble color provides a “incredibly lively denim blue shade“(Closer to synthetic FD&C Blue # 2 than Blue # 1) in products with a pH above 3.8 and a more purple hue in lower pH products like sports drinks, Rigg said.”In Drinks with a low pH, especially sports drinks or many soft drinks or even alcoholic beverages, acquire a nice deep purple hue. And then there will be more of the denim shade “Blue Two” in the neutral pH range. “

Dave Gebhardt, Senior Director of Technical Services added: “It’s one of the cleanest, brightest purples we have, and even better than some synthetic colors We don’t see any kind of precipitation or anything else in the entire pH range, it is light stable and it really is the first legitimate heat stable blue on the market. “

Combined with something like turmeric, it can too “Create a nice dark green” Shadow, he said.

‘This has been a project for our agronomy team for several years’

While the butterfly pea flower is not difficult to grow, said Gebhardt, it is “not a great commercial harvest,“And Sensient has worked with farmers at the source to both secure supplies and develop crops with higher yields.

“We are building this supply chain further to make it ready for use as paint by major food manufacturers. So we source the petals from Southeast Asia and then carry out the extraction in one of our facilities in Europe.

“This has been a project for our agronomy team for a number of years; We have the largest collection of genomes for butterfly pea flowers so we work directly with the farmers to get them the best seeds for flowers and then there was a lot of work on the processing side … how do we get these petals in a position so we don’t lose color. “

Colors from microbes instead of plants

When asked whether Sensient expects more natural colors to be produced by microbial fermentation than from plants in the future, he said: “We are very aware of this arena, we have discussions with a lot of people about it, so we see this as a growing space, although there are still some challenges to make this commercially viable.

“But huge investments and resources are being invested now, and it is something [in which] we are actively involved. “

Read the FDA last ruleOn the petition for Sensient coloring additives stating that Sensient has provided data from the scientific literature associated with 28 and 90 day rat studies, multiple in vitro tests, data from human clinical studies on anthocyanins including delphinidin, the main coloring component of the Extract, and data to suggest it contains some protein, but “extremely unlikely “They could act as allergens.