Certasure™ Spotlight: Protecting Paprika Extract for Colour

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 set via Regulation (EC) No 396/2005. However, some ingredients pose more of a risk than others. One natural colour that falls in that high-risk bucket is paprika extract. A wildly popular colour, paprika brings bold orange shades and many flavors to life across a wide variety of applications from snacks, to beverages and dairy products.

Global Assurance of Paprika for Colour
The Certasure™ program not only tests each lot of the raw material for paprika for colour 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. This exceeds Europe’s limit of 0.001 ppm and whilst this would be below US limits of 2.0 ppm, the raw material was rejected globally and returned to the vendor. It’s up to the vendor’s discretion to re-market that lot of paprika to another colour supplier or discontinue.

Partnership with Vendors and Farmers
Ensuring that food ingredients like colour are safe is a collaborative endeavor between colour 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 colours, please don’t hesitate to reach out. All of Sensient’s natural colours are robustly tested through the Certasure™ program. The shield logo that appears on the packaging of all of our natural food colour shipments represents our promise to help protect your brand and your consumers.

To get started with Certasure™-tested natural colours like paprika, request a sample!