All-Natural Cloudy Beverage Emulsions

Cloudy Connotations

Today’s consumers don’t like to compromise at all, especially when it comes to their food and beverages. They want all of the health benefits but without any added ingredients that appear to be artificial. The desire for beverages with benefits makes formulations more complex and challenging than ever before.

There are a few ways that beverage brands are innovating to please consumers – by reducing sugar, cutting calories, and shortening ingredient lists to familiar, easily recognizable components. Beverage brands often communicate functionality through the use of a ‘cloudy’ appearance and thicker mouthfeel. Beverages like juice, juice drinks and enhanced waters incorporate specific cloud emulsions in product formulations to connote the functionality and taste of real juices and other ingredients. These same emulsions also give the beverage a thicker mouthfeel, further suggesting an authentic fruit and vegetable experience.

However, the most commonly used ingredients for these cloudy connotations are not so label friendly or well-known to consumers. In fact, Sensient recently conducted national research on consumer attitudes toward the three most popular cloudy agents: Gum Arabic, Ester Gum, and Ester of Wood Rosin. According to our data, 80% of consumers would be hesitant to purchase a juice or juice drink containing Gum Arabic, Ester Gum, or Ester of Wood Rosin.

“…80% of consumers would be hesitant to purchase a juice or juice drink containing Gum Arabic, Ester Gum, or Ester of Wood Rosin.” @SensientColorNAtwitter-btn

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The negative perception of these ingredients does not come as a surprise since a vast majority of today’s consumers are seeking out label statements with more familiar and easily recognizable ingredients. Additionally, there are technical challenges when formulating with cloudy emulsions, specifically their compatibility with all of the other emulsions in the recipe. Sometimes, food scientists are working with as many as three different emulsions including a flavor emulsion, color emulsion, and cloud emulsion. If they are not agreeable with each other; for example, mixing an oil-based emulsion with a water-based one, then you will most likely run into a ringing effect. So there are a lot of unknowns here: unknown ingredients to consumers and unknown compatibility
of separate emulsions.
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A Simpler Ingredient Statement Solution for Juices, Juice Drinks and Enhanced Waters

At Sensient we spend a lot of time listening to consumers, so we can proactively prepare for what is on the horizon. We’ve spent the last several years preparing to meet the demand for clean-label formulations, and a simple ingredient, cloudy color solution from fruit and vegetable juices was amongst our priorities.

I am happy to introduce our range of turn-key cloudy natural color solutions for beverage developers—Smooth Beverage Clouds.

Sensient’s Smooth Beverage Clouds use our proprietary emulsion technology to create unique, cloudy color solutions offering a number of key advantages…

1. Fewer Ingredients: Removes Gum Arabic, Ester Gum, and Ester of Wood Rosin.The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) indicates non-color components within color solutions are considered “Incidental additives” and do not require labeling in food applications unless they provide an additional function to the food.Combining the cloud and color into a single-delivery emulsion eliminates the need to label cloud-inducing ingredients, such as Gum Arabic, Ester Gum, and Ester of Wood Rosin.

2. Ingredient Compatibility: Increases overall beverage formulation efficiency by eliminating the complexity of multiple emulsions.

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Our standard line of Smooth Clouds beverage solutions delivers beautiful shades of reds, oranges, yellows. Custom shade options like your Superfruit purples or other specific target shades are available as well.

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