The Natural Colour Summit 2013, held in Amsterdam and run by FI Conferences, brought together delegates from around the world to hear about challenges and opportunities with Natural Colours. With growth in the market driven by consumer and regulatory pressures, the opportunities are clear. Regulations are not straightforward however and we heard from several speakers about the importance of keeping abreast of changes in regulatory systems across the world.
With the increased uptake of Natural Colours, the technical demands on those products are increasing too. Unlike with synthetic colours, it’s not possible to design out poor application properties by designing new molecules, instead new approaches to formulation and stabilisation have to be tried. A number of speakers from amongst the colour suppliers were able to talk about the advances they have made, particularly in stabilisation of these often very sensitive products to changes in temperature, heat and light. We also heard about the challenges of reformulating food and beverage products to replace synthetic colours with natural products.
The presentation from iFormulate concentrated on some interesting and novel approaches to formulation drawn from other industries which might be usefully applied to Natural Colours. There is a big opportunity to transfer technologies from industries such as pharmaceuticals and cosmetics to the food industry and we expect to see these approaches grow over time.
Please contact us on info@iformulate.biz if you’re interested in any of these approaches.
Jim Bullock, iFormulate 2013
