Marketing trends force brands to consider light damage

Marketing trends force brands to consider lightdamageBy Guy Montague-Jones, 08-Jul-2010The latest trends in beverage and dairy are forcing companies to consider the potentiallydamaging effects of light on product quality.Shelves are lined with more and more drinks packed in clear bottles and filled with natural andfunctional ingredients but these are precisely the trends that make light exposure a majorconcern for brands. In the third installment of our four-part special edition on shelf life, weconsider what damage light can inflict on products and how best to mitigate it.What is affected?Exposure to light can damage the colors, vitamins, lipids, and flavours in beverages, cuttingshort shelf life and eating into product value.Although some synthetic dyes like FD&C blue #1 and artificial flavours like aspartame arevulnerable to light, Carol Zweep, manager of packaging and nutrition labelling services atGuelph Food Technology Centre, said natural ingredients are particularly vulnerable.Carotenoids, anthocyanins and chlorophyll are all groups of natural colours that can degradeand create undesirable shades when exposed to light. Some citrus flavours can also degrade,creating off-flavours.As formulators look to make more natural products, this can prove to be a headache.Another trend that is forcing companies to consider light damage is fortification as manyvitamins can degrade with light exposure, reducing nutritional value and causing unpleasantsensory changes.Light can also accelerate the oxidation and degradation of lipids and fatty acids. This makesmilk, especially long-life milk, one of the most light sensitive beverages. Light exposure causeschemical reactions that can modify the proteins and fats in milk, and yoghurts, damagingflavour and vitamin content.What to considerSo when deciding how best to protect products from light damage, what factors shouldmanufacturers consider.

Zweep said it is important to think about the nature of the light that products are exposed to.She said a lot of brands focus on UV light when products spend much of their life beforereaching the customer under flurescent lighting. It can therefore be important to consider howexposure to visible light will affect product quality.But before even thinking about the nature of the light hitting product packaging, it is importantto consider the nature of the product itself.Morag Girdwood, global brand development manager, at ColorMatrix said beverage brandspromoting the high vitamin content of their products should pay close attention to the impactof light. This is not only because light can affect the vitamin content but because of theconsequences for taste if light is allowed to degrade the vitamins.Another important consideration is the shelf life that companies are looking to achieve. If theywant to sell a product with an extra long shelf, such as a long-life milk, then more protectionwill be needed.For a milk product, Girdwood warned that there is some compromise between length of shelflife and the ‘whiteness’ of the bottle that is achievable.Another potential aesthetic compromise relates to bottle transparency. Beverage brands wantto show off the content of their products but Zweep from Guelph Food Technology Centre saidthis makes it difficult to protect products from light.Girdwood claimed that ColorMatrix has developed a solution to this problem with the creationof a light protection technology that is added to the colour rather than the resin of the bottle.There are in fact a range of options open to brands looking for light protection, with thedecision as to which one to go for dependent on their mix of priorities. Options include theaddition of a white colorant or a UV additive, and the use of a multilayer bottle or a full bodyshrink sleeve.To help companies decide which option to go for, testing services are available. Niama Boutroy,a spokesperson from Sidel, which runs a packaging testing service in France for sensitivebeverages, said they map out different options and see how they perform against the desiredshelf life in the expected environmental conditions, on a worst case scenario basis.As for the next steps in light protection, Girdwood from ColorMatrix said the company isworking on combining different technologies and meeting sustainability requirements. Thiscould mean combining oxygen and light protection while allowing manufacturers to continuereducing the weight of their bottles.