Five minutes at FI Europe  with … 

Ivano Fiori
Managing Director

Agro Food Industry Hi-Tech: What is unique about GNT?

Ivano Fiori: We produce Exberry® unique colouring foods and not any E numbers Food additives. Our Exberry® Coloring foods are concentrates from vegetables, fruits and other edible plants with colouring properties. We define Exberry® as completely separate from colorant additives: we do not produce chemistry. We follow the vertical integration, meaning that within our Company Group there is a section devoted to follow everything from the seed onwards. We have our own farmers working on our fields or on fields we rent, and we cultivate everything by ourselves. All our vegetables are edible for human consumption, selected for their colouring potential. The aim is to colour food at the highest level of naturalness. We have two production facilities, one in the Netherlands and another in Germany. The vegetables are washed, shredded, put into evaporators and then concentrated and filtered. In the end you obtain a water solution that maintains the colours, the nutritional benefits and the flavours of the original source. The solutions from different fruits and vegetables are then blended to obtain the complete palette of colours needed by our customers. We process our vegetables at the top maturation phase, immediately, to preserve the highest level of colour and freshness.

AF: And all the process uses only water?

IF: The only solvent is water, yes. We stabilize Exberry® with citric acid or lemon juice and inverted sugar. All the products we treat and we obtain are edible. We use further natural processes to obtain high green and blue colour shades from Spirulina, an edible algae with high colour properties or specific natural brown colour from orange carrot to replace caramel colour

AF: What plant varieties do you use?

IF: We select our own varieties to provide the maximum colour potential.

AF: What advantages and disadvantages there are in using GNT colouring foods?

IF: Clearly the first and foremost value is the clean label: in the label the ingredient will figure out as a “Concentrated carrot” or “Concentrated blackberry”, not something like E150D or beta-carotene. Of course there are some compromises to accept due to few technical limits of natural colouring foods and different cost in use compared to the E numbers. But often our customers really want to colour without additives, and so they are ready to compromise on this.

AF: What types of foods are driving most of your market?

IF: Confectionery, first and foremost, especially for kids. Plus, fruit preparations for the yogurt and bakery application, or fruit-based juices and soft drinks. Ice creams are another great market for us.

AF: Given that sometimes you need more of your colouring than for a chemical additive, does this have an impact on taste?

IF: Our concentrates Exbrry® must have the same organoleptic characteristics of the original source. Most of them do not have a significant taste in the quantities needed and do not impact the finished product. Some have little offtaste and specifically used in some specific food application.

AF: What about health benefits? Is health nutrition something you are exploring in the future?

IF: Currently our line of products is focused on coloring foods. But there is a line of products that looks at health benefits –it comes from a line of products in our portfolio. It will contain anthocyanins form red fruit and berry fruits, carrots for carotenoids, lycopene from tomatoes, and so on: it will be the functional food version of our colouring line.