It would be easy to fill an entire magazine with arguments about the wisdom or idiocy of the trend towards natural flavours. People who have spent their working lives in the flavours industry get hopping mad about how out of touch consumers are with scientific evidence about the safety and effectiveness of synthetic ingredients.
But there is one fact that is impossible to argue with - the juggernaut of public opinion will not change course any time soon. A growing army of British consumers is demanding food with only 'natural' flavours, regardless of whether there is any science to support the notion that they are 'healthier' or 'better'.
The natural ingredients bandwagon is the market reality and food manufacturers are jumping on board. "We're seeing a dramatic growth in the demand for natural ingredients, even in the last 12 months," says Steven Pearce, md of Omega Ingredients and president of the British Society of Flavourists (BSF). "People used to say they were fine with nature identicals but now they are all asking for natural flavours."
Keeping it real
You might expect him to be rubbing his hands with glee at the prospect. After all, Omega counts a wide selection of natural and organic products from suppliers around the world among its range. Surely the trend towards naturals is good for business? But Pearce takes a wider view: "It's what everyone's dreaded in a way. We simply don't grow, anywhere in the world, enough of the necessary crops to give everyone natural flavours."
"It's a bit like organic food," agrees consultant, Dr David Baines. "If everybody bought organic we'd have problems with food supply. I've seen a calculation done that said that if we had to replace raspberry flavour with naturally extracted raspberry then the whole of England would be covered with raspberries."
The supply problem is exacerbated by the fact that British consumers tend to be pretty conservative in their choice of favourite flavours. "In 2004-5 there were around 5,000 new food products launched in the UK. Of all those products, the predominant favours were still strawberry, raspberry, chocolate, orange and vanilla. It doesn't matter how many exotic ice creams there are out there, people still like strawberry, chocolate and vanilla," says Pearce. "How on earth are we going to supply enough?"
Blame the weather
The other big supply problem is that many of our favourite flavours come predominantly from one or two parts of the world, leaving the supply extremely vulnerable if things go wrong. Treatt supplies essential oils and other raw materials to the flavours industry, and can cite a variety of cases where 'localised' problems have had a significant knock-on effect on world prices.
For example, Argentina is the world's biggest lemon oil producer. In 2000, over 60% of the vital Tucuman province was underwater, while in 2003, the same area suffered a drought that reduced the lemon crop by 25%.
Hurricanes in 2001 ripped the grapefruit from the trees in Cuba. And when the same thing happened in the US in 2004, it pushed up the price of grapefruit oil to around eight times its previous level.
But perhaps the most dramatic example of all is vanilla. "Vanilla has been through a real rollercoaster," says Giles Bovill, marketing manager for Treatt. "In 2003 it was at ridiculous prices and now it's back at an all time low."
The price spike was caused by a combination of hurricane damage on Madagascar and a difficult political situation on the island. "The price of vanilla beans shot up by 10 times," says consultant and founding member of the BSF, Jack Knights.
"But it wasn't just the weather. A major reason was the political situation. The trouble is that a lot of these raw materials come from countries that aren't very stable."
And even when the political situation in a source country is relatively sedate, crops can still be vulnerable to the whims of social politics. According to Pearce, blackcurrants are a good example of this: "There are two reasons why blackcurrants are in short supply at the moment. First, it's because there was a very hot summer in Poland and that affected the crop. Second, there aren't enough people to pick them because many workers have moved to western Europe looking for better wages. And we're seeing the same situation with raspberries."
Technical hurdles
But uncertain supplies are merely the first challenge of going natural. Relying on natural extracts also presents significant business and technical hurdles. "It's possible to have natural flavours but they're expensive and they don't work very well except at high levels," says Knights.
"In nature, the actual flavour compounds are often present at parts per million, parts per billion or even lower concentrations," says Baines.
When you take into account the greater quantities needed to get a good result, Knights estimates that many food manufacturers face bills for natural flavours that are 10 times higher than when they use synthetic ingredients.
But it's a premium that manufacturers must pay in the drive for 'clean' labels and consumer acceptance. "It really comes down to how you want to label the finished food," says Knights.
Precisely what manufacturers will and will not be able to claim on their labels is currently causing considerable concern, with the new Food Improvements Agent Directive (Directive 88/388/EEC) poised to spawn fresh European regulations in as little as two years' time (Food Manufacture, October 2006).
Basically, however, the rule is that a natural flavour can be produced from a natural source material only by physical, enzymatic or microbiological processes. If you want to call it natural strawberry flavour, 90% of it has to be derived from strawberry and the other 10% must be from other natural sources.
"So your flavour may be 90% concentrated natural strawberry juice, but it's the other 10% that is usually responsible for most of the flavour and that can be made up of any natural material, including naturally produced chemicals," says Knights.
"Consumers think that natural strawberry flavour is just made from strawberries, but it's not. An increasing number of normally used synthetic flavour chemicals are being produced by these [physical, enzymatic and microbiological] processes. The flavours industry is doing a lot of work to find methods of making natural versions of the flavour chemicals it has traditionally used," he says.
Variability is the other technical bugbear of using natural flavours. "The 10% ingredients can go some way to mitigate any variability, although even these compounds are from natural sources and are still quite variable as a result," says Knights.
Stability and shelf-life are also considerations, but not necessarily because of the nature of the flavours themselves. "At the same time as they're calling for natural flavours, retailers and consumers are asking for preservatives and antioxidants to be taken out, so manufacturers have to resort to alternative approaches, such as modified atmosphere packaging," says Pearce.
Back to the soil
Many of these issues will be all too familiar to those manufacturers in the organic sector. For these companies, flavour houses are increasingly offering specialist products from organic sources. In fact, the European rules on organics (EEC 2092/91) say that the flavours used in organic products must be "natural and extracted by physical means", and do not specify that the source of the flavour has to be grown organically.
The Soil Association - Britain's largest organic certification body - bases its guidance on these rules, but takes things a step further. "If the flavour isn't named, you can use a natural flavour from a non-organic source, but we have an extra requirement for named substances," says Keith Ball, head of processor technical services. "If you want to market 'organic mint tea', the mint would have to be grown organically."
The Soil Association also specifies that the only solvents that can be used in the extraction process are water, ethanol or carbon dioxide. Again, the ethanol doesn't have to be from an organic source for general natural flavours, but it must be organic in the case of a named flavour.
There is also confusion about the "5% rule" for organic food, which says that manufacturers may use up to 5% of non-organic agricultural ingredients in their products and still label them as organic. However, Ball is clear that this does not apply to flavours, which are counted under additives and processing aids, rather than agricultural ingredients.
"The whole situation is very confusing," admits Ball. "And with new regulations and new people coming in with new products all the time, it's only going to get more complicated."
In the end, cost will probably do more than any moral or scientific arguments to encourage consumers to opt for synthetic flavours. "This whole trend is really driven by a few people who can afford to buy organic food from the organic shelf whatever the cost, but the average man in the street simply can't afford to do that," says Pearce. FM
KEY CONTACTS
- British Society of Flavourists 01925 758628
- Omega Ingredients 01473 836400
- The Soil Association 0117 314 5000
- RC Treatt 01284 702500