Introduction

Colour is an important constituent of food as every food is associated with a certain type of colour. Addition of colour gives, food an attractive and appetising appearance, and of the enhances the acceptability. Natural colourants are extracted from natural herbs, plant parts, animals like kokam, beetroot, safflower, purple grapes and a very large source. Then natural colourants could be a good substitute for the synthetic food colours. Use of synthetic colours in the food products come to be looked upon with certain amount of apprehensing with regard to their safety. Many countries have restricted the use of synthetic colours in food products. This has provided impetus and need for development of alternate colours and natural colours are now being considered as alternative.

Process

The raw materials are cleaned, cut into small pieces and after preprocessing, subjected to percolating. Percolation is a process of extraction after which the product is centrifuged to get the desired product which is again pasteurised, concentrated, dried and packed in a suitable container. The process involves number of unit operations depending on the raw material used.

For details contact, e-mail : ttbd @ cftri . res . in