Marrying the increased appeal of clean label with the continued desire for visually attractive products, three experts discuss the rise of natural colouring foods.
It is often said that we eat with our eyes, making colour one of the most important factors for judging the quality of a food product.
Colouring food dates back centuries; a technique used by our ancestors to make morsels more appealing and enhance its perceived quality. For example, the characteristic yellow hue of rice was obtained by adding saffron. By the end of the 19th century, in the USA and Europe, the use of colour additives in the food industry was an ingrained habit with popular products such as ketchup, mustard and sodas featuring artificial colourants like cochineal (E 120), tartrazine (E 102) and caramel IV (E 150d), respectively on their labels. The use of synthetic dyes rapidly increased due to their lower costs, ease of production, and greater colouring strength and stability compared to natural-der