Scaling Natural Colors: Practical Lessons from the Lab to the Production Line

Niveditha Ravishankar is an  R&D Manager at McCain Foods with over a decade of experience in product development including confectionery and frozen foods. Her expertise spans ingredient technology, clean-label formulations and processing innovation.Early in my career, I learned this firsthand while switching a confectionery coating from an artificial dye to a natural color annatto. On the bench, I used a small percentage of water-soluble annatto (norbixin) in a fat-based coating with no issues. But during scale-up, that same formulation caused the coating to thicken and seize because the water-soluble color introduced moisture into the fat system. To fix this, we had to add a significant amount of oil, which increased production costs by creating a variance in fat percentage during scale up. The key to troubleshooting was realizing that our formulation used norbixin, the water-soluble form of annatto, in a fat-based coating. While this didn’t cause problems on the bench, it became an issue during production. The solution was to go back to the bench and reformulate with bixin, the fat-soluble version of annatto. This change made the coating stable during scale-up and eliminated the need to add large amounts of oil to fix viscosity in production.

Another challenge I have encountered in using natural colors such as fruit and vegetable powders in snack food is that the powder can quickly clump in the hopper due to the humidity in the production room, drawing moisture from the environment due to their hygroscopic nature. An approach that has worked in mitigating this, has been the addition of anti-caking agents such as silicon dioxide as a processing aid in fruit/vegetable powder formulation. Processing aids that are a subset of incidental additives, such as anti-caking agents as added ingredients in a formulation, can be excluded from the finished product label especially if it is not present in significant amounts in the finished product because these are added only for processing and have no functionality in the finished food product. In addition, using smaller pack sizes of these powders can ensure you don’t have a large volume of hygroscopic powder sitting in the hopper for an extended period of time, drawing moisture into the hopper and clumping leading to downtime in production that is spent scraping this out.

Last but not least: It is crucial to have the right “gold standard” and references for the quality teams at the factories, especially if color is a key quality attribute in a product. Natural colors can fade over time, so it is important to replenish these reference products at a set frequency, and in addition, using tools like pantone charts are also immensely useful. A creative approach I have used as a scientist is creating a color spectrum using “craft tackle boxes” to clearly indicate the spectrum of acceptable color to ensure that the operations and quality teams at the factory are equipped with the right tools for a successful scale up for coatings and fillings that use natural colors.