How Manufacturing Food Additives Can make Your Business Profitable
Rasa Bihari Mishra
Business Consultant : Helping Chemical, Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology, Food & Agro Processing, and Formulations Industries become Profitable & Sustainable - Concept to Commissioning Support and Technical Training
Manufacturing Food Additives can help you not only Build a Profitable Business but also make a significant contribution to the Food Industry.
In order to know about the answers, you need to get into the details of food processing industry.
But manufacturing processed foods is challenging. Why?
Because the processed food must serve many purposes. Not only the food products must have the taste and flavor but also safety and long shelf life.
But how to achieve it?
Here food additives come into the picture.
Because one of the effective ways is to use food additives. They play significant role in food processing. In fact, the food additives work behind the scenes in making the food products delicious, safe and long lasting.
Let’s know about the food additives.
Food Additives
When you get into the details of processed food manufacturing, you’ll find the usage of food additives is necessary. They are added to food products during processing to enhance their flavor, appearance, texture and to achieve extended shelf life.
In fact, these substances serve many functions. This help in preserving the freshness, preventing product spoilage, improving taste, and making the food products nutritious.
Though the food additives play a crucial role in modern food processing, they may have adverse health effects. That’s why the regulatory agencies are closely monitoring the use of the food additives. By setting safety standards and conducting rigorous testing they are giving their approval for food additive usage.
In fact, consumers must read ingredient labels and make informed choices about the foods products. That’s how the usage of food additives should be optimized with respect to safety, nutrition and convenience.
But before getting into the details of manufacturing food additives, we must check whether it makes business sense or not. Isn’t it?
Here let me ask you an important question.
How to ensure the success of any manufacturing business?
You must focus on the value addition. It doesn’t matter what type of business you’re dealing with. In fact, It’s the value addition potential which makes the difference between success and failure. Unless the business adds significant value, it can’t succeed.
And when it comes to the manufacturing food additives, it’s one of the most profitable business segments because it serves essential purpose in food processing.
Why Food Additives
As we’ve discussed, food additives play a crucial role in food industry because of many reasons.
Some of the important reasons are mentioned below:
Food Preservation
The food additives such as preservatives help in extending the shelf life of food products by inhibiting the growth of microorganisms which spoil them. The aim is to ensure that food remains safe to consume for longer periods. That's how it helps in reducing food wastage.
Improving Flavor and Appearance
Food additives like flavor enhancers, coloring ingredients, and texture modifiers are used to improve the food products. It’s important to improve the taste, flavor and appearance. Because it results in the improvements in overall sensory experience making the food products more appealing to consumers.
Enriching the Food Products with Nutrients
When you fortifying the food products with food additives like vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients, it addresses nutritional deficiencies and promotes public health. As for example adding iodine to salt helps in preventing iodine deficiency diseases. And when you fortify the food products with vitamins, it helps in preventing vitamin deficiency diseases.
Food Processing Aids
Food additives serve as processing aids, facilitating manufacturing processes used in food processing industry. Because important unit operations like emulsification, leavening, and thickening are necessary to make high quality processed foods.
In fact, they help in maintaining the product quality and consistency during production processes. It’s essential to ensure uniformity and avoid batch to batch variations in product quality.
Food Safety
The most important aspect is food safety. That’s why many food additives are used to enhance food safety. They help in preventing microbial contamination to reduce the risk of foodborne illnesses. Similarly, food additives like antioxidants are added to prevent the fats and oils from becoming rancid. That’s how they help in maintaining food products safety.
Improving Convenience
Food additives contribute a lot in developing convenience food products. Take the case of instant noodles, ready-to-eat food mixes and many other convenience foods.
In fact, they help in creating new food formulations with improved taste, texture, and nutritional profiles. The aim is to cater to the changing consumer preferences and meeting the lifestyle requirements.
No doubt, the food additives are commercially very important. But how to select them?
Selection of Food Additives
The food processing industry is changing very fast. The food products which are made today may not have market demand tomorrow. Because new food products are getting developed to satisfy the human wants in a better way with respect to safety, convenience and nutrition.
That’s why the basis on which you’ll select and evaluate the product suitability must change. Because you don’t have any other choice other than changing your business strategy. In fact, you need to continually evaluate the food additives in order to add massive value to your manufacturing business.
Before getting into the product details, you need to know how they’re manufactured.
Manufacturing Processes
If you focus on how food additives are made in the industry, you’ll observe five different manufacturing processes:
Let’s discuss about them one by one…
Chemical Synthesis
When you bring about the molecular changes to the raw material molecules to make the products, it results in molecular conversion. Here the raw material molecules are changed to the product molecules.
When you’re using chemical reactions to bring about the changes in the molecules, you’re using the power of chemical synthesis. But there’re different types of reactions to make different products. And each reaction has its own process conditions along with the advantages and disadvantages.
Using chemical synthesis to make the products is the first step. As the product molecules are still in the reactor along with other undesired molecules, you need to isolate them in pure form. That’s why you need suitable separation processes to recover them followed by purification processes. It’s necessary to make them suitable for the customers.
When it comes to the food additives, different types of compounds from preservatives and antioxidants to coloring compounds are manufactured by chemical synthesis.
Industrial Fermentation
Sometimes the molecules you want to make are too complex. Especially when the chemical synthesis-based processes fail to achieve required molecular conversion economically, you need to think of alternative like fermentation.
But there’s additional advantage in using industrial fermentation. Because the food additives are used in the food products, synthetic molecules are not preferred. Since fermentation is a bioprocess, the products made by fermentation has additional advantages in food usage.
Industrial fermentation makes use of the power of the microorganisms.
Here specially developed microorganisms are grown in the fermentors under optimized process conditions in order to make those molecules. For different products you need different types of microorganisms.
But the fermentation process only makes the products. So, proper separation and purification processes become essential to recover and purify the products from the fermented broth in order to make them suitable for the customers.
Many special food additives like vitamins and nutritional ingredients are made by fermentation process.
Product Extraction from Natural Sources
When you search for special molecules, you’ll find that natural sources are the store house of many useful products.
If you analyze the compositions in the plant kingdom, you’ll be amazed at the product stock. Plants make many exotic ingredients because of various reasons through enzymatic biochemical processes.
That’s why in many cases all parts of the plant like leaves, seeds, fruits, flowers, and barks are used to extract useful products.
Because it’s very difficult to synthesize these complex compounds by using manmade processes. And it becomes economically efficient to get them from the natural sources.
Both pure compounds and mixtures of multiple compounds are obtained for commercial usages. Of course, it’s important to ensure that the separation processes do justice to the product quality requirements. Because both pure ingredients as well as mixtures are used as food additives.
Formulation of Functional Ingredients
As we’ve discussed above the food ingredients are used for their performance. Because the customers ask for many features in their favorite food products. But no single ingredient can perform all the functions and meet all the requirements of the consumers.
Because of that the only way left is to mix different substances to make the food additive suitable for food processing. That’s how you incorporate different features. Of course, some components in the mixture do the major job while others help in meeting minor requirements.
These are nothing but formulation-based food additives.
In a formulation, individual components never react with each other. The proportion in which they’re blended is based on the requirements. The idea is to make the formulation effective for the application it is designed for.
But where to manufacture the food additives?
Based on the products you want to make and the manufacturing processes you’ll use, you must have a well-designed manufacturing facility to make the products at commercial scale.
Now let’s come back to the type of food additives.
As we've seen why it makes business sense to get into food additives manufacturing business, you need to know about the details of the commercially important food additives. Isn't it?
The food additives can be categorized into major groups based on their applications. Of course, there are some overlaps. Some food additives can perform in multiple ways.
Since the food additives are used in the food products, you must strictly follow the guidelines issued by the statutory authorities and comply with the food safety regulations.
Let’s discuss about some of the important categories of food additives:
Additives to Acidulate and Regulate Acidity
Both the acidulants and acidity regulators have similar functions.
Acidulants
The acidulants make the food products sour or acidic. Most of the acidulants are acidic in nature. They provide sour and acidic flavor to the food products. Most of the times they’re used to improve the perceived sweetness of food products.
Acidity Regulators
When you talk about the acidity regulators, they are the additives which control and adjust the acidity or alkalinity of the food products. That’s how they help in maintaining the desired pH level. Of course, it’s critical in food processing with respect to preserving the freshness and texture of the food products.
Acidulants used in Food Industry
Many organic acids like acetic acid, citric acid, tartaric acid, malic acid, fumaric acid, gluconic acid and lactic acid are used in food industry. Most of these compounds are found in nature. Sometimes mineral acid like phosphoric acid is used especially in the beverages.
Acidity Regulators used in Food Industry
When it comes to acidity regulators many organic acids like sorbic acid, acetic acid, benzoic acid and propionic acid along with their sodium salts are used in food processing.
How they’re Manufactured
Most of the organic acids and their salts are manufactured by chemical synthesis. However, the organic acids like lactic acid, gluconic acid and acetic acid in the form of vinegar are made by using fermentation technology. When it comes to tartaric acid most of the supply is made by extraction of biobased sources.
No doubt, these are very important for food processing. But the usage must meet the food safety regulations.
Additives to Preserve the Food Products
In order to preserve the food products for a long time, you must focus on two aspects. One is the microbial degradation and the other is product spoilage due to oxidation.
The preservatives are added to preserve the food products from microbial degradation or chemical degradation like oxidation. Antimicrobial preservatives save the food products from microbial degradation. Whereas antioxidant-based additives prevent oxidation.
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Antimicrobial Additives
Preservatives which prevent microbial growth are very important. Because the major reason for food product spoilage is microbial degradation. They work by inhibiting the microbial growth.
In fact, they’re extremely important with respect to food safety to prevent food borne illnesses.
Antioxidant Additives
Antioxidants which prevent chemical degradation like oxidation are very important. Because the oxidation process spoils most of the food products, especially fat containing food items. The oil and fat in the food products become rancid when they come in contact with air due to the presence of oxygen.
That’s how antioxidants prevent the oxidation degradation. And they maintain the quality and extend the shelf life of the food products.
Antimicrobial Preservatives used in Food Industry
Many chemical compounds like sorbic acid and its salts, benzoic acid and its salts, propionic acid and its salts, paraben group of chemicals, sulphites, nitrites, nitrates and phosphoric acid are used in food industry for antimicrobial preservation. Most of these compounds are synthetic chemicals.
Antioxidants used in Food Industry
When it comes to the antioxidants, many organic compounds like ascorbic acid, tocopherols, propyl gallate, tertiary butylhydroquinone, butylated hydroxy anisole and butylated hydroxytoluene are used in food processing.
How they’re Manufactured
Most of the antimicrobial preservatives are manufactured by chemical synthesis. With antioxidants also most of them are manufactured by chemical synthesis. However ascorbic acid is made by semisynthetic process and most of the tocopherol supply is made by extraction from biobased sources.
No doubt, these are very important for food processing. But the usage must meet the food safety regulations.
Coloring Food Additives
Food coloring ingredients are used in food industry to replace the colours lost during the processing. Additionally, they’re necessary to make food products look more attractive to the consumers.
Most of these additives are dyes or pigments which color the food products. They’re added to all kind of food items. In fact, coloring food additives are used in both commercial food processing as well as domestic food preparations.
The coloring food additives are used for many reasons:
Color Retention Additives
In the food industry color retention additives are used to preserve the existing color of the food ingredients. They are added to food products to prevent the color from changing during processing and storage
Coloring Additives used in Food Industry
The coloring additives used in food industry comprise of both natural and synthetic substances. When you talk about the natural substances based on chlorophyll, carotenoids, anthocyanins and betanin are used. These additives include caramelized sugar, lycopene (from tomato) and curcumin (from turmeric).
With artificial food colors many synthetic chemical compounds are used. Ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) is used as color retention additive.
How they’re Manufactured
Most of the natural coloring food additives are made by extraction from biobased sources While the artificial food colors are made by chemical synthesis. When you talk about the color retention additive ascorbic acid, it is made by semisynthetic process.
The coloring food additives are very important for food processing. But the usage must meet the food safety regulations.
Additives to Fortify the Food Products
Fortifying additives are used in food industry to increase the nutritional quality of the food products. They’re necessary avoid deficiency diseases.
Three types of fortifying additives are used in food processing:
Vitamins
Vitamins are essential nutrients for efficient metabolic functions in human body. They’re organic compounds which cannot be synthesized in sufficient quantities in our body. But they’re required in very small quantities and must be obtained from diet.
Some of them are not pure compounds but of mixtures of related compounds. Different types of vitamins are used as additives to improve the nutritional quality of the food products.
Minerals
Minerals are essential nutrients for efficient metabolic functions in human body. They’re inorganic compounds necessary for the enzymatic biochemical reactions in the body. But they’re required in very small quantities and must be obtained from diet. Many types of inorganic salts are used as additives to improve the nutritional quality of the food products.
Food Supplements
Food supplements are essential because they include essential amino acids, vitamins, minerals, fiber, fatty acids and other health enhancing nutrients. They’re required for maintaining health. Most of them are mixtures of many nutrients. In fact, they’re formulated to carefully to supplement human diet. They’re added as per the requirements of the food products to improve the nutritional quality.
How they’re Manufactured
The vitamins are manufactured by using different manufacturing processes. Chemical synthesis, fermentation process and extraction from biobased resources are used to make the vitamins. Of course, based on the techno-commercial aspects manufacturing processes are selected.
However, as the food additives are used in the food products, manufacturing processes based on fermentation and extraction from biobased resources are preferred.
Mineral salts are normally made by chemical synthesis. As far as the food supplements are concerned, they’re formulations consisting of vitamins, minerals, and other essential nutrients. Natural extracts made from biobased resources are used in many food supplement formulations.
The fortifying food additives are very important for food processing. But the usage must meet the food safety regulations.
Sugar Substitutes and Flavoring Agents
Most of the food additives enhance the taste of the food products. But the important taste enhancers are sweeteners and flavouring agents. They’re necessary to make food products more appealing to the consumers.
Sugar Substitutes
To sweeten the food products sweeteners are added. In most of the food products sugar is used. But for special cases like sugar substitutes are added. They are added to keep the food energy at low level because of their beneficial effects. Sugar is not preferred for the consumers who are suffering from diseases like diabetes and tooth decay and those who want to keep their calorie intake low.
Flavoring Additives
Flavoring additives are used to give food products a particular taste or smell so that they become appealing to the consumers. The favoring ingredients work by improving the perceptual impression of the food products.
The flavoring enhancers are used to enhance the natural flavor of the food products.
Sugar Substitutes used in Food Industry
The sugar substitutes used in food industry include aspartame, sucralose, acesulfame potassium, saccharin and stevia. Other types of sugar substitutes used are sugar alcohols like erythritol, xylitol, and sorbitol.
Flavoring Additives used in Food Industry
The flavoring additives used in food processing include many natural and artificial ingredients. The flavor enhancers used in food industry include glycine salts, glutamic acid salts, yeast extract and ribonucleotides.
How they’re Manufactured
Most of the artificial sugar substitutes are made by chemical synthesis while the natural sugar substitutes are made by extraction from biobased sources.
The artificial flavoring additives are made by chemical synthesis while the natural sugar substitutes are made by extraction from biobased sources.
Most of the flavor enhancers are made by either chemical synthesis or fermentation process. Most of them use semisynthetic process – a combination of chemical synthesis and fermentation technology.
The sugar substitutes, flavoring additives and flavor enhancers are very important for making food products. But the usage must meet the food safety regulations.
Other Food Additives
Many other food additives are used in food processing. They’re necessary to make food products meet the consumer demands and safe.
Let’s discuss about some of them.
Stabilizing Additives
Stabilizing additives are used in food processing to improve the texture and stability of the food products.
Thickening Additives
Thickening additives are food additives which improve the viscosity of the food products. To make them more appealing to the consumers
Flour Additives
Flour additives are used in food industry to improve the baking process and the quality of baked food products.
Additives used for Glazing
Glazing additives are used in food industry to improve the appearance of the by providing protective coating to the food products.
Emulsifying Additives
Emulsifying additives are used in food industry to make emulsion-based food products and stabilize them.
Bulking Additives
Bulking additives are used in food industry to improve the bulk of the food products without affecting other qualities.
Anticaking Additives
Anticaking additives are used in food industry to prevent the particles in powdered or granulated food products from sticking and make them free flowing.
Foaming and Antifoaming Additives
Antifoaming additives are used in food industry to prevent foaming while foaming additives help the formation of foam in the food products as per the requirements.
Let’s Conclude
Food additives are essential for the Food Industry. Because these products serve various functions in food processing like enhancing their flavor, appearance, shelf life and nutrition.
When it comes to Food Additives Manufacturing Optimization you can make the business Profitable and Sustainable.
Importance of Food Additives
Food Additives play a crucial role in food industry:
Types of Food Additives
Let’s discuss about some of the important categories of food additives:
Business Optimization
Today the food processing industry is changing very fast. In fact, the food products which are made today may not have market demand tomorrow. New products will take their places. They are getting developed to satisfy the human wants in a better way with respect to safety, convenience and nutrition.
So, the basis on which you’ll select and evaluate the product suitability must change. Because you don’t have any other choice other than changing your business strategy. You need to continually evaluate the food additives in order to add massive value to your manufacturing business.
When you identify the techno-commercial incongruences correctly and find out effective solutions to add value, you can develop great profit-making manufacturing business ideas.
Let’s join hands in using innovations in manufacturing Food Additives and developing them further to make your Manufacturing Business Profitable and Sustainable.
What's your experience in Manufacturing Food additives?
Business Consultant : Helping Chemical, Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology, Food & Agro Processing, and Formulations Industries become Profitable & Sustainable - Concept to Commissioning Support and Technical Training
5moInnovative natural food additives can help in Food Processing without compromising on the nutritional qualities and health benefits of the processed food. They can be made by extraction from biobased sources. As for example natural food antioxidants can improve the shelf life of the food products without compromising on the health benefits. What are your thoughts on using this approach to develop profitable and sustainable manufacturing businesses?