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

With the recent FDA guidelines and growing consumer demand to move away from artificial colors, a major focus area in the food industry is transitioning to natural colors across a wide range of products.

As an R&D product developer, I find this both exciting and challenging. Replacing synthetic dyes with natural alternatives is not a simple one-to-one swap, whether at the benchtop or in full-scale production. There are several factors to always keep in mind.

Color is closely tied to both flavor perception and brand identity. Natural colors bring limitations: They tend to be less vivid than synthetics, they fade faster over shelf life, and they are more sensitive to light, pH, and temperature. One effective approach is blending pigments from different natural sources to create a synergistic effect. Adjusting pH is another powerful way to shift hues, depending on the product.

When scaling up, I have also had to plan for batch-to-batch variations in natural pigments, which impact both formulation and cost. Allowing flexibility in production to add more or less color can help maintain consistency.

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.McCain FoodsEarly 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.