Creating Colourful Beverage Syrups
From coffee drinks to milkshakes to refreshers, quick service restaurants are capitalizing on consumer interest in delicious, unique beverages. Bolstered by “treat culture”, a common response to an uncertain macroeconomic atmosphere in which shoppers add or upgrade relatively small purchases instead of major splurge occasions, elevated drink launches are popular LTOs.
To create these standout beverages, brands typically use syrups that impart flavour and colour to a standard base. Developers tasked with creating beverage syrups tend to face several common questions regarding colour:
What pH is the finished good?
The pH level of beverage syrups plays a crucial role in the stability and vibrancy of natural colorants. Anthocyanins, for instance, exhibit optimal stability and impart red to pink hues in acidic environments, typically at lower pH levels. Conversely, lycopene demonstrates good stability in higher pH conditions, making it suitable for use in less acidic beverages as long as regulatory dosage limitations are being adhered to.
Request a consultation with our technical team to find the best suitable colour solutions for your beverage formulations.
What is the target shade or flavor?
Some target hues are more plentiful in nature than others. There are many natural red and pink solutions available on the market, while a coral or green might require a more unique solution. Supporting the flavour profile with a complimentary colour is important to conveying the taste of a beverage from the beginning of the customer experience.
Research shows that consumers are disappointed by colours that don’t match a specific flavour profile, such as a red drink with a blueberry flavour, or a colourless beverage with a tangerine flavour. Optimized colour lifts purchase intent +5% and flavour perception +15% across categories.
Sample Deliciously Bright Natural Colours Here
What other factors may influence ingredient performance?
Heat, light, and regulatory conditions may impact colour ingredient performance or stability. Colour experts can guide developers away from unstable solutions for best performance. Sensient offers a deep portfolio of clean-label alternatives to solutions that are facing regulatory or consumer pressures, such as titanium dioxide or caramel.
How versatile does
the syrup need to be?
Some brands prefer to launch a range of products in the same flavour or colour family that may have different conditions, such as refreshers and coffee-based drinks, or a coffee drink and a matching flavoured foam topping. Colour experts can work with your brand’s requirements to help you achieve these goals and reuse ingredients across multiple products.
What is the target usage rate?
When crafting beverage syrups, it’s essential to ensure the colour is bold and vibrant, as syrups are typically diluted into the final beverage base. The right colour intensity in the syrup application is crucial to achieving the desired shade and turbidity in the finished product. Sensient’s Advanced Emulsion Technology (AET™) provides a range of vivid yellow-to-orange shades that stand out in both syrup and finished beverage applications. It also ensures that natural oil-soluble colours can perform effectively in water-based systems, delivering high stability and excellent consistency. This advanced solution allows beverage manufacturers to create syrups with exceptional visual appeal, enhancing the overall consumer experience.
What else is on your mind?
Sensient’s team of experts loves to talk colour and has years of industry experience helping developers and brands bring new, unique products to life to delight consumers. We can’t wait to see what your team creates for the next viral refresher, latte, macchiato, lemonade, or milkshake! Let us know how we can help or get started with a coloring food or natural colour sample or a refreshed natural colour library today!
