Innovation doesn’t come overnight. With VIVAPIGMENTS®, it also never stops. Director Research and Innovation at CAPOL Inc., Dr. Plamen Nikolov, reflects on developing the natural color pigments from ideation phase to their latest technological advancements.
After years of extracting the red cabbage juice from the sprawling fields of the province of Quebec, Canada the nucleus of the technology that would become VIVAPIGMENTS® was born. At the center was the realization that although nature provided numerous options for liquid and soluble natural colors such as anthocyanins from red cabbage we could not offer a solution from our natural extracts that could replace the insoluble functionality of synthetic lake pigments.
The journey to matching the performance of lake pigments, a product resulting from transformation of soluble synthetic FD&C dyes to insoluble pigments through the immobilization on aluminum salts, had started.
The many years conception and tinkering led to the solution – binding of nature’s extracts to a protein and thus immobilize the chromophores without any chemistry. Rice protein was selected for its insolubility, taste neutrality and most importantly an amino acid profile closely resembling that of mother’s milk and the absence of allergenicity.
And there it was, instead of using aluminum salts, rice protein would be the key to encapsulating our plants extracts. With the subsequent increase in insolubility, and imparting color through dispersion, we could finally offer an alternative to the synthetic lake pigments.
Following the early conception days of VIVAPIGMENTS®, the innovation and development of the technology has only continued to accelerate to meet the ever-increasing expectations as the food industry transitions to natural colors.
Deeply intertwined within our innovation outlook is a core commitment to sustaining the clean label of the VIVAPIGMENTS® technology.
And thus, starting from the fields of Quebec and transitioning towards encapsulating with new extracts and now with a number of exciting innovation projects in our pipeline, the future of VIVAPIGMENTS® is only getting brighter.