The challenge of natural flavouring

By Dr Anna-Carin Bäckman

A flavouring is a concentration of an aroma that can be added to many types of food, e.g. soft drinks, candy, bakery, dairy and ready-to-eat meals. The basic idea behind natural flavourings is that the used raw materials must stem from a natural source. The raw materials can for example be plant extracts or distillates (called natural preparations), but single chemical substances isolated from plants are also used. The cost of raw materials for natural flavourings depends on the availability of different source plants, the occurrence of desired components and the complexity of the production process. The cost of raw materials for natural flavourings therefore range from low to economically inapplicable, compared to raw materials produced by chemical synthesis. In general, the price of natural flavourings is higher than for “non-natural” flavourings. Another constraint when creating a natural flavouring is the smaller size of the toolbox; some of the otherwise used raw materials do not occur in nature and others cannot be purchased.

With the forthcoming EU-legislation, the present range of commercially available isolated natural substances will most likely be reduced. Many of today's flavourings will probably have to be re-formulated. The labelling of natural flavourings within the EU will also become very dependent on the source of the raw materials. As an example, at least 95 percent of the raw materials will have to stem from a strawberry plant in order to use the label "natural strawberry flavouring". Today, a natural strawberry flavour may contain natural raw materials from strawberry, raspberry, orange etc. The consequence of the new labelling legislation is that single natural flavouring components must be produced from many different raw material sources. In general, this will result in increased raw material prices as well as increased inventory costs. The industry faces a big logistic challenge to handle natural raw materials after source.

The consumer safety is of course the main concern for the new EU legislation, as well as the prevention of misleading marketing. However, very little attention has been drawn to the control aspects. With present analytical methods, it can be very hard to trace the plant species origin of used raw materials. In addition, it is often difficult to investigate what processes that have been used during production (the processes allowed for production of natural flavouring raw materials are strictly limited within the EU legislation, and they are different from the authorised processes in the US). Because of the higher cost for natural raw materials, the authenticity of natural flavourings is an issue for the whole supply chain of the flavouring industry as well as for the regulatory authorities.

Einar Willumsen is a modern flavour house with flavouring creation and application laboratories as well as an in-house analytical laboratory. We have strong focus on the legal aspects of flavouring development, production and sales. Our raw materials are monitored under the quality demands of BRC certification. This is our recipe for creating superior flavours, when speed and taste matter.

Biography

Dr Anna-Carin Bäckman is an Analytical Chemistry Scientist at A/S Einar Willumsen in Denmark. She works with the development of new flavours and is project leader for the company's raw material documentation system. Bäckman has a PhD from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences with a research background in plant emitted volatiles.