Final Research Paper

Started by Praburaman Mohan (Spring 2021)

Understanding Food Coloring and its Various Components

Authors

Praburaman Mohan

Professor Bradley Sturgeon

Fall 2020 - Spring 2021

Abstract

Commercially Obtained food colorings that come in a pack of three or four colors such as red, blue, yellow and green, all have a mix of each individual color in the container. Those dyes are not 100% pure. This was discovered with repeated tests with the UV/Vis and the HPLC. The 2 dimensional peaks and 3 dimensional peaks from the HPLC exposed us to different forms of data visualization, which aided in a better understanding of the food coloring. In this experiment, the relationship between the UV/Vis and the HPLC was also explored to understand how different concentrations of samples affect the spectra and the chromatogram respectively. The conclusion drawn was that the HPLC is able to process higher concentrations and provide proper visual presentation than the UV/Vis.

Introduction

Food dyes or food coloring have played an important role in the food and nutrition industry and even more importantly in our kitchens on a day to do basis. We buy our food coloring from a local grocery store and use it accordingly. A traditional food coloring packet has a set of red, yellow, blue or red, yellow, blue and green dyes. A typical food coloring packet may have the ingredients; water, propylene glycol FDA-certified color additives Yellow 5 and 6, Blue 1, Red 40 and propylparaben. In a situation where one needs a different color for example a light shade of purple, the easiest solution would be to buy that shade of purple but someone who understands color would have to mix red and blue food coloring and dilute it with water to get the desired shade of purple. This raises the question, how can there be a bottle of green food coloring but there is no mention of a FDA certified green dye on the list of ingredients. Since green is made from mixing blue and yellow it now makes you wonder if the other primary colors are just red, yellow and blue and not combinations of each other in subtle amounts. This paper discusses the different components of food coloring with the help of a liquid chromatographic technique and 3D visualization of the results.