‘A significant milestone for the food sector…’ Sensient’s ‘exceptionally heat-stable’ natural blue food colour derived from butterfly pea flower has been approved by the FDA.
Following a petition from Sensient Technologies, the FDA approved an aqueous extract of the blue petals of butterfly pea flower (Clitoria ternatea) – a plant native to Southeast Asia – as a colour additive exempt from certification. Sensient Technologies described the approval as “a major milestone for the food industry” that “closes an important gap in the natural colour palette.”
According to Sensient global director of marketing David Rigg, the “exceptionally heat stable” colour can be used in a variety of applications such as drinks, sports drinks, carbonated soft drinks, fruit drinks, coffee creamers, ice cream and frozen dairy desserts, fruit preparations in yoghurt, chewing gum, coated nuts, and candy.
“It’s a very big deal because colour additive approvals are like rare birds, they don’t happen very often.” While Sensient has previously sold the blue colour to a small number of clients as a vegetable juice, he believes that receiving FDA approval as a colour additive would give larger food and beverage firms the confidence to utilise it.
“We still believe it would qualify as a vegetable juice under the Code of Federal Regulations. However, we decided to file a colour additive petition in 2018.”
Other natural blue colour sources
Right now, US formulators don’t have a lot of possibilities for natural blues, which can be utilised as blue shades but also as building blocks to make natural greens and purples when mixed with other natural colours, according to Rigg.
Ecoflora SAS has filed a colour additive petition for a natural blue from jagua, a tropical fruit also known as huito, according to the FDA’s list of colour additive petitions under consideration, and a petition to obtain clearance for natural blue from Gardenia fruit is also in the works. A third petition was recently filed for a blue colour derived from the algae Galdieria sulphuraria.
While spirulina extract was authorised as a blue food colour for candies and gum in 2013 and in a far broader range of applications in 2014, he claims it “doesn’t have the same thermal stability” as butterfly pea flower and “doesn’t do very well in high water activity applications like drinks.”
“It’s a little bit disappointing for the entire business that there isn’t a more simplified process for getting new natural colours approved,” Rigg said, noting that it took three years for the FDA to approve butterfly pea flower extract.
Impossible Foods, which filed a similar colour additive petition around the same time (late 2018), received approval just a few months later in July 2019, with the FDA moving at “lightning speed,” according to Rigg, though this could be explained by the fact that the agency had already reviewed much of the same data in the company’s GRAS notification for the same ingredient.
‘A stunning denim blue hue.’
So, how is it to work with butterfly pea flower blue?
According to Rigg, the water-soluble colour provides a “incredibly vivid denim blue shade” (closer to the synthetic FD&C Blue #2 than Blue #1) in beverages with a pH over 3.8 and a deeper purple hue in low pH items like sports drinks. “It will be a stunning deep purple colour with low pH liquids, such as sports drinks or many soft drinks or even hard drinks. In the neutral pH range, it will be more of that denim ‘blue two’ shade.”
“It’s one of the cleanest, brightest purples we have, even better than some synthetic colours, and we don’t see any type of precipitation or anything else across the pH range, it’s light-stable, and it’s really the first legitimate heat stable blue on the market,” said Dave Gebhardt, senior director of technical services. When combined with something like turmeric, it may also “create a lovely dark green” colour, according to him.
The butterfly pea flower extract is a dark blue liquid prepared by the aqueous extraction of dried butterfly pea flowers that is further processed by ultrafiltration to remove residues of plant products, followed by concentration and pasteurization.
‘This has been a long-term effort for our agronomy team.’
While the butterfly pea blossom is not difficult to grow, it is “not a huge commercial crop,” according to Gebhardt, and Sensient has worked with farmers to secure supplies and create plants with better yields.
“We’re continuing to create that supply chain so that it can be used as a colour by large-scale food manufacturers.” So we get the petals from Southeast Asia and extract them in one of our European facilities.
“This has been a project for our agronomy team for a number of years; we have the largest genome collection for butterfly pea flowers, so we work directly with farmers to provide them with the best seeds for flowers, and then there’s been a lot of work on the processing side… how do we get those petals in a position so that we don’t lose colour.”
The butterfly pea flower extract is a dark blue liquid made from the aqueous extraction of dried butterfly pea blossoms, which is then ultra-filtered to eliminate plant product residues before being concentrated and pasteurised.
Colors derived from microbes rather than plants
When asked if Sensient expected more natural colours to be produced through microbial fermentation rather than extraction from plants in the future, he said, “It’s an arena that we’re very aware of, we’re having conversations with a lot of people about this, so we do see this as a growing space, although there are still some challenges to making this commercially viable. However, there is a significant amount of money and resources being put into this right now, and we are actively involved.”