Are you familiar with the natural sources used to make yellow colour extracts? Caty Meleuc, Colours Technical Specialist – Europe, discusses natural sources for yellow colour extracts and the benefits of these hues in a food or beverage.
Why use a yellow colour extract?
How a product looks impacts the consumer’s purchase and even influences how food and beverages are perceived through taste. The colour yellow is typically associated with joy, luxury, warmth, and sunshine.
Popular applications that are expected to be yellow are ones that traditionally use eggs or butter. Sometimes these ingredients have been reduced or replaced to make a product vegan, such as in margarine, batters, cakes, or ice cream. The yellow hue provides a message of quality, luxury, and indulgence to the consumer. Similarly, in curry and chicken soups, cheese sauces, pickles and many others, the naturally sourced colour allows a match between visual appearance and taste.
Where do natural colour extracts come from?
Natural colours, derived from fruits, vegetables and other natural sources, are increasingly sought-after by consumers who desire simpler, cleaner ingredient labels. They want to recognize and understand the ingredients in the food and 
beverages they consume. Naturally sourced colours help alleviate consumer concerns regarding synthetic food colours by clearly identifying where the ingredient comes from and placing trust in a long tradition of foods being used as colours.
Natural sources for yellow to orange colour extracts include safflower, turmeric, carrot, yellow paprika, and annatto. These sources may be subject to geographical restrictions and are also dependent on agricultural factors. Each source can be used alone or in partnership with one another to provide a range of different hues: from zingy citrus with a slight green note using safflower and turmeric, to deep golden egg yellow using carrot and paprika.
Factors to Consider
A key factor to consider when using a colour extract is solubility. Ingredients with colouring properties are naturally oil or water soluble. However, the pigments’ solubility can be adjusted through expert formulation to increase usability and create more stable, longer lasting colours. For example, water soluble turmeric emulsions for pickle applications enable the pickles to absorb the turmeric, whilst the carrot in the brine protects them from light in clear jars.
When formulating, one should always consider a range of factors: solubility, hue, transparency, packaging, food matrix interactions, ingredient declaration, and shelf life conditions (heat, light, oxygen). Heat is one factor that does not need taken into consideration, as all yellow extracts are stable throughout heating processes.
Kalsec Natural Colours
Did you know that Kalsec has a full line of naturally sourced colour extracts for a variety of food and beverage applications – from vibrant reds, oranges and yellows to cool blues and greens – that provide a bold, clean label replacement to synthetic colours. Explore Vegetone® Natural Colours that provide you with consistent and reliable performance.
Kalsec offers Naturebrite® Colouring Foodstuffs, a range of minimally processed products which can be declared as food on your label. From red to orange to brown, we offer standard and custom-made hues to meet your specific colour requirements.
Learn more about Kalsec’s yellow naturally sourced colour extracts.