Nature identical colours beverages

BASF offers the beverage industry more than 20 different drink ingredients, which not only contribute to consumers’ health but also provide an attractive colour: healthy vitamins and carotenoids in juices and soft drinks assist balanced and healthy nutrition, while carotenoids also give drinks the required colour.

Brilliant colours and high stability can be achieved with Lucarotin and LycoVit from BASF.

The stability of the colour of drinks depends on various parameters: on the exposure to light, on the temperature, on the interactions between the ingredients, on the degree of homogenisation and on the pH value. Compared with colouring foodstuffs such as red beet and natural colouring agents such as curcumin or artificial azo dyes, BASF’s nature-identical carotenoids are considerably more stable.

Furthermore, they are not dependent on the pH value of the medium or the degree of homogenisation.

The formation of collars of water or rings around the neck of the bottle and deposits of solid ingredients (sedimentation) at the bottom of the bottle can also be prevented with the BASF products. Colouring agent can also settle readily on the neck of transparent PET bottles.

The removal of such undesirable discoloration can only be achieved with a large input of energy and time, resulting in increased costs prior to refilling. There is a solution to the problem: BASF’s stable carotenoid formulations prevent this staining effect. They do not require plastic bottles to be pretreated in any special way and also, in many cases, do not require any modification to the drink recipe, eg, with the help of hydrocolloids.

BASF’s carotenoids offer further advantages. Industrial production ensures a high and, above all, consistent product quality. As antioxidants they protect the drink, do not react with vitamin C and have only little effect on the taste.

BASF offers two different carotenoids: beta-carotene (Lucarotin) and, more recently, lycopene (LycoVit).