Assessing the sustainability of natural and artificial food colorants

Abstract

Food producers thrive towards the satisfaction of today's consumer demands for natural, safe, and sustainable food products. Thereby, the application of food colorants is a major issue. In this article, we aimed at giving insights into the evaluation of natural and artificial food colorants and revealing weaknesses within the value chain by use of a hot spot analysis. Implying red hues, natural plant-based anthocyanins (E163) and lycopene (E160d), natural animal-derived carmine (E120), and chemically synthesized Allura Red AC (E129) were chosen to cover a wide range of value chains. Three major metrics were identified - environment, economics including legal aspects, and social responsibility. The first two metrics considered topics related to food producers and food additive manufacturers. Animal husbandry and crop cultivation, yield of the raw material, environmentally friendly production, exploitation of by-products, and naturalness were indicators for the environment metric. The economic metric consisted of the additives’ convenience for application, price, sensory properties, shelf life, restriction as limited application and legal labeling, stability within the food matrix, and availability. In contrast, the metric social responsibility combined all topics important to consumers and workers such as health promoting or harming ingredients, consumers’ attitudes towards the additives, as well as working conditions during production. Applying the indicators to four different food colorants all imparting the same color hue, the natural, plant-derived colorant anthocyanins (E163) was found to be more sustainable than the natural, animal-derived colorant carmine (E120), the natural, plant-derived colorant lycopene (E160d), and the artificial colorant Allura Red AC (E129).