Sensient Flavors uses proprietary technologies to create value-added flavour systems and customised solutions for customers in the beverage, sweet and savoury industries. A recent addition to its range offers complete solutions for products with authentic taste profiles and flavour to support new products from Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Traditional berry options have evolved to include more exotic and unusual variants including floral notes for products where wellness positioning forms part of the portfolio. Functional flavours and proprietary technical solutions that enable sugar, salt, fat and calorie reduction without compromising on taste are also one of the biggest innovators at the moment.
Sweet and savoury temptations
Flavoured Caramels’ texture and viscosity offers an ideal filling for premium chocolates, candies, pralines and chocolate bars. It can also be applied in a broad range of dairy products such as yoghurt, ice cream and chilled or frozen desserts.
The combination of high quality caramel with natural extracts and exciting flavours allows for new taste sensations, including fruit flavours, spiced chai variants, zesty salted orange or spicy notes such as cardamom, cinnamon and ginger extract. Low calorie versions are also available.
Maintaining taste while reducing sodium and fat, underpins this range in the savoury category. Seasonings, soups, sauces and dressings, ready meals, processed meat, cheese, snacks, and canned products can all benefit. The range comprises flavouring solutions that enhance the Umami sensation and compensate for salt and fat reduction in terms of taste and mouthfeel. These functional flavours are vegan, and are free from calories, salt and MSG, palm oil and GMOs. They are produced using the company’s own high quality raw materials and ingredients.
The Umami Enhancer improves mouth feel, allows for clean label declarations and can be added to existing flavour concepts. The Long Lasting Enhancer makes fat reductions of up to 30 per cent possible. The clean label Sodium Replacer is perfect for salt reduced products (up to 30 per cent) and also acts as a masking agent for off notes.
Tapping into Spirulina
Sensient Food Colors Europe has developed proprietary technology for the extraction of Spirulina blue that complies with both the new EU Guidance Notes and FDA quality specifications. Sensient has invested in a dedicated production line for Spirulina blue at its facility in Corte Tegge, Italy, which specialises in the processing and concentration of aqueous extracts.
‘This latest investment enables us to offer customers a wider choice of colouring food possibilities to meet new demands in the marketplace,’ comments Dr Roland Beck, managing director of Sensient Food Colors Europe. ‘Using our proprietary extraction technology, we can produce a vibrant blue shade from Spirulina suitable for use in confections, gum, ice cream, water ice and frosting type applications.’
Another innovation is Pure-S, which enables food manufacturers to achieve bright natural colour shades with no off taste. Bright Orange Pure-S, suitable for beverages, is a transparent emulsion and highly efficient with an extremely pure sensoric profile. In addition, the product offers significantly improved light stability over standard vegetable extracts, making a perfect alternative to synthetic Sunset Yellow (Yellow 6) having a very bright and transparent colour hue.
The new Pure-S Strawberry Antho, with its unique bright red shades, is an excellent alternative to carmine and to Allura Red (Red 40). It is perfectly suited for use in confectionery such as high boiled candies and jelly sweets. It creates a brilliant strawberry hue in yoghurts as well as in other applications including flavoured powder mix desserts, puddings and fruit glazes. In water ice it also produces an intense strawberry type red shade. Dr Andreas Klingenberg, technical director of Sensient Food Colors Europe, comments, ‘The innovative technology behind the Pure-S range opens up far wider application possibilities for these new natural colours, bringing the purest colour experience with no off taste to the market.’
