Certasure™ Spotlight: Protecting Paprika Extract for Color
The Importance of Vigilance in Food Safety
Recalls and food safety concerns in consumer packaged goods are noted threats to consumer health and brand perception. To mitigate and reduce the potential risk of food safety issues, manufacturers must rely on the vigilance of ingredient suppliers with respect to standard and quality—this is no easy task!
For treats and snacks targeted at children especially, the presence of pesticides is clearly a brand risk. Nearly for any agriculturally grown ingredient, there is a maximum level of pesticide residue allowed and instated by the FDA; however, some ingredients pose more of a risk than others. One natural color that falls in that high-risk bucket is paprika extract. A wildly popular color, paprika brings bold orange shades and many flavors to life across a wide variety of applications from snacks, to beverages, to pet kibble and dairy products.
Through Sensient’s Certasure™ Food Safety Program, Paprika Is Tested For All Five Top Hazards And Hundreds Of Other Risks And Contaminants.
Global Assurance of Paprika for Color
The Certasure™ program not only tests each lot of the raw material for paprika for color but it also scans the source against many other hazards. Each shipment of paprika is analyzed for regional compliance; for example, a lot of paprika oleoresin could pass pesticide residue tests for the United States, but the same lot could fail for Europe. For example, one recent lot of paprika Sensient received showed 0.43ppm of the pesticide, Chlorfenapyr. Although this amount is below the US limit of 2.0ppm, it exceeds Europe’s limit of 0.01ppm–the raw material was rejected and returned to the vendor. It’s up to the vendor’s discretion to re-market that lot of paprika to another color supplier or discontinue.
Partnership with Vendors and Farmers
Ensuring that food ingredients like color are safe is a collaborative endeavor between color supplier, vendor, and farmer. On raw materials like paprika peppers that have high-risk to certain contaminants, we encourage vendors and farmers to pre-screen material before it rolls through the Certasure™ program as an extra step of caution. Even with prescreening, Sensient still fails shipments every year due to pesticide detection, so the collaboration with growers is inevitably very important to resolve risk issues for future lots.
Together, we work through and educate one another on prevention strategies to mitigate the possibilities of field-to-field, equipment-to-plant, and intercropping/sequential cropping contamination.
Formulating Naturally and Confidently
If you have any questions about the safety or integrity of natural food colors, please don’t hesitate to reach out. All of Sensient’s natural colors are robustly tested through the Certasure™ program. The shield logo that appears on the packaging of all of our natural food color shipments represents our promise to help protect your brand and your consumers.
To get started with Certasure™-tested natural colors like paprika, request a sample!
