Longer Shelf Life with a Clean Label: Is It Possible?
Latest ingredients developed to support a longer shelf life also have clean label in mind because, first and foremost, consumers demand ingredients they recognize.
One of the inherent tensions of food production in the past years, since the rise of the clean label trend, was to satisfy two requirements. One was to offer a long shelf life, a process that requires chemical preservatives to help prevent food decay and waste as well as profit loss. The other – to not alienate consumers, who, especially since the start of the pandemic, pay more attention to the ingredients in their food. And some ingredients are just not acceptable anymore, especially if they sound like artificial compounds.
The developers caught up with this trend and have recently made available ingredients that fulfill both expectations.
Plant-based, CO2-neutral Emulsifiers
Palsgaard launched Palsgaard SA, a series of powdered emulsifiers for industrial baking that help replace up to 20% of the egg content – thus helping with the increased costs of eggs. Based on polyglycerol esters (PGEs) of fatty acids, the emulsifiers offer many functional properties, allowing egg content to be cut by an average of 20%. Another Palsgaard ingredient is the Emulpals series for cake premixes, which are whipping-active emulsifiers. Both Emulpals and Palsgaard SA are plant-based, sustainably sourced and produced in CO2-neutral factories. They can also be used to create better-for-you cakes because they are free from trans fats and can allow a shift from saturated to unsaturated oils.
As opposed to traditional cake gels or hydrates, which are typically based on monoglycerides that can perform poorly on stability, these two series are based on polyglycerides that help prolong the shelf life of baked goods.
Clean Label Starches and Alternative Sugars
To promote shelf-life longevity and improve the appearance of fresh and frozen iced baked goods within packaging, the key is to manage free water migration. The team at the BENEO Technology Center has resolved this issue of water migration in iced baked goods by combining BENEO’s alternative sugar Palatinose and sucrose in a specific ratio, which brings different components of a baked good (cake, filling, icing) to the same water migration level. Palatinose is an alternative sugar, it’s a disaccharide manufactured by the enzymatic rearrangement of sucrose from beets, and is labeled with its generic name isomaltulose.
BENEO’s new clean label functional native rice starches, Remypure, give bakery fillings a soft and creamy texture for a long time, while being a natural and clean label ingredient. The texture is obtained thanks to the uniqueness of the rice starch which has small granule size when compared to other starches. In addition, it offers the baked goods a freeze-thaw functionality that adds to their shelf life – that is, pastries can be frozen and thawed without losing texture and integrity.
You can read the rest of this article in the Fall issue of World Bakers Digital, which you can access by clicking here.