Designing Clean-Label Beverages
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Beverages Clean Label March 2014 ww Crystal Clean: Designing Clean-Label Beverages By Kimberly J. Decker, Contributing Editor All it took to turn “brominated vegetable oil” into a household name was a bottle of Gatorade, a 15- year-old and an online petition. Those were the three simple, increasingly familiar ingredients that, when combined and agitated at Internet speed in late 2012, aproduced the most recent brouhaha to emerge over a “chemical-sounding” additive to our foods and beverages. To recap, Sarah Kavanagh, a Hattiesburg, MS, teenager, noticed brominated vegetable oil (BVO) among the ingredients on her sports drink’s label and, not knowing what it was, turned to Google for clarity. Alarmed to find results linking BVO to everything from neurological damage to hormone disruption and skin lesions, she did what any other digitally empowered “netizen” would do and launched an online petition asking Gatorade’s parent company, PepsiCo, Purchase, NY, to stop using BVO in the sports drink and its other brands that contain it, like Mountain Dew. The petition racked up more than 200,000 signatures within months, and though PepsiCo denies any direct influence on their decision, the company announced the phasing out of BVO from Gatorade— though not Mountain Dew—in January 2013. The lesson: these days, perception is reality, and in a wired world even a misperception can shape millions of mindsets in the time it takes to tap a finger. As Kelly Newsome, corporate communications, GNT USA, Inc., Tarrytown, NY, says: “Consumers do care about what’s in the foods and beverages they consume. They want to recognize what the ingredients are and where they come from, and feel good about consuming them.” They also want sports drinks and sodas—to say nothing of juices, teas and other drinks—that meet expectations for taste, texture, color and stability. So beverage manufacturers have to find clean-label ingredients that not only look good on labels but work well in the bottle, too. Feeling and fact Sarah Kavanagh isn’t the only one reading the beverage-label fine print. As Amy Lauer, marketing manager, North America, Tate & Lyle, Hoffman Estates, IL, notes, “According to the Natural Marketing Institute, 47% of consumers said they looked for foods and beverages with a short list of recognizable ingredients in 2013.” Moreover, Mintel’s Global New Products Database (GNPD) lists fully 409 U.S. beverages launched in 2012 with “pure,” “real” or “simple” in the product name, compared to only 178 in 1999. But one person’s “pure” can be another’s puffery, and abstractions offer scant guidance to beverage developers looking for a definition of “clean label” that they can formulate on. Alas, it remains a “know-it-when-you-see-it” concept. The USDA National Organic Program (NOP) may spell out what qualifies as “organic,” and “natural” may have a strict regulatory meaning with respect to meat, poultry and flavors, but a term like “clean label” traffics more in feeling than in fact. www.foodproductdesign.com Page 1 Beverages Clean Label March 2014 Elusive balance That puts beverage manufacturers in a bind. As Mathieu Dondain, director of marketing and communication, Nexira, Rouen, France, says, “The clean-label trend can be defined asconsumer demand for products free of complicated and chemical-sounding additives, made with short and understandable ingredients lists and minimal processing.” It’s within these constraints that the beverage industry “needs to find a good balance of quality, price, guaranteed shelf life, food safety, pleasant taste and healthy ingredients,” Dondain says. And that’s a tricky balance for beverage makers to find because, with the exception of, say, freshly pressed juice or milk straight from the cow—and who drinks that?—rare is the drink whose contents we don’t tinker with. Even “pure” tap water undergoes chemical treatment. So whether we’re tinting a smoothie pink or flavoring an orange soda, we continually pursue that elusive balance between ingredient function and familiarity. Weighty matters Which brings us back to BVO and why little Sarah found it in her sports drink. Brominated vegetable oil is what’s known as a weighting agent. It, along with weighting agents like sucrose acetate isobutyrate (SAIB) and glycerol ester of wood rosin (ester gum), are frequent fliers in beverages like citrus-flavored soft drinks because, as Himanshu Shah, senior manager, technical services, US Canada ingredients solutions, Ingredion Inc., Westchester, IL, explains, “In many cases, flavor oils that are used in beverages (e.g., orange oil, lemon oil, etc.) are lower in density than water and tend to float to the top of the beverage.” At about 0.845 to 0.890 grams per cm3 compared to 1.038 to 1.046 grams per cm3 for a typical aqueous sugar solution, such oils have a specific gravity lower than that of the liquid phase with which they’re emulsified in the finished beverage. This is a problem because the greater the difference in specific gravity between these two immiscible phases, the harder the emulsion is to stabilize. Left unchecked, the dispersed oil droplets eventually coalesce and separate from the aqueous portion, producing the infamous “ringing” that plagues inadequately stabilized and emulsified citrus beverages. But as their name implies, weighting agents effectively weigh down the flavor oils, bringing their density nearer that of the aqueous phase and stabilizing the beverage emulsion. “This lowers the oils’ tendency to rise to the top and increases the stability of the emulsion,” Shah says. “In addition to increasing density, weighting agents are often added to the oil phase to enhance the opacity or cloudiness, which is a desirable feature for many beverages.” And what’s not to like about that? Well, BVO may not be the insidious killer that some web accounts would have you believe, but FDA did take it off the GRAS list in the 1970s, limiting its use to 15 ppm as an additive “permitted on an interim basis pending further study” in fruit-flavored beverages. (Limits on ester gum and SAIB are 100 ppm and 300 ppm, respectively.) And, though FDA sees no need to revisit BVO safety at this time, concern about bromine accumulation in the body sufficed to trigger bans on BVO as a food ingredient in the European Union, Japan and India. But there may be other reasons to reconsider using BVO. For despite their functionality, weighting agents are expensive—contributing up to half a beverage emulsion’s cost, according to Ingredion— dissolve slowly and with much effort, preclude beverage clarity and can even settle out in alcoholic www.foodproductdesign.com Page 2 Beverages Clean Label March 2014 applications. Clean-label alternatives that eliminate those drawbacks present the proverbial win-win- win, easing production, lowering cost in use and pleasing consumers. Go-to gums According to Per Pihlsgard, senior beverage specialist, GNT, “Most flavor emulsions these days are typically made with gum acacia (also known as gum arabic) and weighted with ester gum—which, in my opinion, is the most label-friendly system.” And, though he notes that modified starch can serve as an emulsifier with SAIB as the weighting agent, “those aren’t as label-friendly as gum arabic and ester gum.” Shah notes that his company developed a natural emulsion stabilizer that eliminates the need for weighting agents. “Without weighting agents,” he says, “there is no limitation on the level of flavor that can be added to achieve the desired flavor intensity and desired opacity provided by the oil. Formulators are free to innovate, and tailor the flavor and opacity of the beverage, without concern for restrictions imposed by regulations governing weighting agent levels.” Key to these systems’ success is an ability to pack more oil into the emulsion efficiently. On that front, Dondain says his company’s acacia gum is “three times more efficient” than traditional grades of acacia, giving it “the highest emulsifying properties.” And because the natural product is instantized, it’s “easy to use and saves energy in the production process,” he adds. It’s also pH- and alcohol- stable, which should come in handy in flavored wine coolers and hard lemonades. The gum, he notes, is “obtained through a unique proprietary process, protecting and enhancing the stabilization and emulsion properties of the Senegal acacia gum specie.” “Consumer and retailer pressure for more natural ingredients has gained manufacturers’ attention,” Dondain notes, and companies like his are responding by expanding not only the pool of clean-label ingredients, but the scope of their approved use, as well. “As an example,” he says, “in response to a petition filed by Nexira, FDA recently amended the food additive regulations to provide for the expanded safe use of acacia gum in foods and beverages.” The change, effective Dec. 6, 2013, allows for higher maximum levels of acacia gum “and includes distinctions allowing for even greater use of acacia gum as a source of fiber,” Dondain says. This may appeal to beverage manufacturers interested in both stripping chemical-sounding weighting agents from their beverages and adding good-for-you nutrients, too. Dondain notes that Nexira’s acacia gum is the only one of its kind that provides a minimum 90% soluble dietary fiber and improves mouthfeel in processed dairy beverages like yogurt drinks, as well as breakfast beverages and dairy-based meal-replacements. “Moreover, its great stability under severe temperature and acidic conditions guarantees a consistent fiber content in high-acid beverages,” he says. As a BVO replacer, however, usage levels are too low to allow a fiber benefit. Color commentary Gum-based systems can do more than replace weighting agents used to stabilize flavor emulsions: they can help deliver fat-soluble vitamins and functional ingredients, as well.