EU organic-compliant flavors for manufacturers
13 Dec 2022 | Gold Coast Ingredients
Gold Coast Ingredients CEO, James Sgro, talks through the changes that happened at the beginning of 2022 regarding EU organic flavor compliance and how the company has developed a new line utilizing different building blocks for customers’ products. These include sweet, coffees, chocolates, fruit flavors and the investment of several million dollars in new processes to continue to become more sophisticated.
I'm with James Scro, who's president of Gold Coast Ingredients.
Welcome, James.
Thank you.
Right, let's talk about the changes that happened at the beginning of the year for EU compliance with organic flavors.
At the beginning of the year, new regulations came in where reformulations were necessitated to meet the.
The new EU requirements and after the last 9 months we've developed a new line utilizing different building blocks that are compliant for our customers' products.
These include Sweet coffees, chocolates, fruit flavors, and we've currently invested several million dollars in new processes over the next year to continue to make building blocks that are more complicated and more sophisticated for our customers' products.
Can you expand on those new processes?
Processes will involve specialized extraction of the aromatic components and then a concentration and further processing of what is left for color and for flavor bulk product.
These will include freeze drying, agglomeration.
And different processes for our customers to utilize in their products.
And what sort of challenges will it help your customers to overcome?
We're getting more basic in the extraction from the natural fruit juice, raw, and further processing, not only for the flavor components, but also for colorants and natural colorant components, and this.
New regulation in the EU was a long time coming, you know.
Did you get ahead of the curve here?
Yes and no.
We were ahead of the curve.
We had been EU compliant organic for many years.
The new regulations, when they came out, they did challenge us in the beginning because of having to find new sources and different sources for the process, right, right, I see.
So organic trends, you know, what do you think is going to happen in that space?
The interesting thing in organic trends is because of the new regulations, there is a big question of being able to produce organic vegan meat and cheese flavors because new regulations require a percentage of the actual named substance as part of it, whereas you can't have.
Beef in a vegan meat flavor and you can't have cheese in a vegan cheese flavor and the organic also you have to have the actual name component in it.
So these are the challenges that we're working through for people who want.
Organic vegan or vegetarian, that sounds very complex.
It is so unfortunately people, unless the regulations are refined, people will be forced to either use organic.
Meat and cheese flavors that actually contain meat or cheese or accept that their vegan flavors will be considered natural, not organic.
And are they investigating that kind of refinement?
Some of our employees have gone to the meetings for the organic certifications and have been asking this question.
Conveniently it's never been answered.
Interesting.
OK, all right, this is obviously a regulation in the EU.
How do you think in the future these kinds of regulations may come in in the US, for instance, or elsewhere?
The interesting thing is that As people are trying to sort through the natural organic questions, we found that the US has taken some of the concepts from the European and other communities, but overall a lot of the world.
Accepted more of the US definitions of organic and organic compliance so we're able to have vegan organic flavors in the US and a lot of other parts of the world.
And finally, James, it's been a difficult year for all industries, the food and beverage industry included, with inflation and all sorts of other issues.
How are you helping to overcome those disruptions?
We've built a new facility in the east coast to further shorten shipping times to the European continent.
We are exploring.
Joint venture partnerships where we can shorten the production times for the European Union and England and ongoing just trying to make business easier for our clients.
OK, thanks very much, James.
Thank you.
