GNT raises crop vibrancy to cut footprint of natural colors
10 Aug 2022 | GNT
GNT sources the raw materials for its broad palette of natural colors from fields across the globe, which are processed into Exberry Coloring Foods. As part of the company’s sustainability agenda, it has the target of elevating the color intensity of its crops in order to minimize its footprint. This breeding process takes years and involves selecting crops with the highest color density.
This is Benjamin Ferrer reporting for food ingredients first from the GNT headquarters in Merlo, the Netherlands, and I'm joined here today by the sustainability manager Rutger de Court, and we're here to talk about the GNT sustainability profile of their coloring foods, so food coloring is made from natural fruits and vegetables.
Hello, hello, thank you for coming here.
Thank you.
For our first question, could you talk about the life cycle of a food colorant and how do you take a fruit or vegetable from farm to factory to our tables?
Yes, thank you for that question.
Basically you already summarized it.
So in fact, our product Xberry is all coming from fields all over the world, so we have farmers.
Grow the crops for us, for example, carrots or sweet potatoes.
They harvest them and they transport them to the factory here in the Netherlands and then we process them into our coloring foods, egg berry products which will be delivered to our customers worldwide.
So that's in a nutshell, our life cycle.
And is now making moves to increase the color intensity in its crops.
So how does this process work and how are you elevating the sustainability profile?
So as part of our sustainability agenda, which includes many topics, we also have one target on color intensity.
And this is for us a very important sustainability target because we feel that if we make sure that the amount of color that the crop has, so we can express that in color per kilo or color per hectare, is actually increasing the sustainability of our process.
You can think of this as using land more efficient, so you need less inputs, less fertilizer, for example, and less water, and we do this.
It's a process that takes many years, so we do this by selecting the most yielding crops, the crops that have the most color, and then breeding them year in and year out so to have better performing crops, basically.
And could you speak to us about how do you measure your results at, your sustainability results?
So talking about sustainability, it's very important to show also how do you obtain the results.
So soon we will be able to demonstrate the footprint of our exberry products.
Per article.
So basically we calculated the CO2 and the water footprints of our processing facilities and also on the field level so that our customers know exactly when they buy Aberry, what is the attached environmental impact to this product, and this will be published quite soon.
So this is one way of us being very transparent about sustainability.
And could you share some alternative approaches to manufacturing?
Like how are you elevating your sustainability profile in manufacturing?
Yes, of course.
So of course everyone knows that cutting the CO2 emissions is an important thing for the whole food industry and I think for the whole manufacturing industry.
So in our case, we need to cut the natural gas consumption that we use for heat processes.
So in fact we don't need gas, but we need heat, and we look into alternative approaches like heat pumps, electrifying it, and that's what we are currently dealing with in the factories to find sustainable heat solutions.
And what is some of the upcycling potential of your side streams from your production, because I think that's a very interesting area of your business.
So we are interested of course in the crops coming into the factory, for example, carrots.
We extract the color out of the carrots to make egg berry, but a large share of what we buy leaves the factory and currently goes into the feed industry.
But as part of our sustainability approach, we want to upcycle this to the food industry to extract, for example, proteins, fibers, and other functional ingredients.
So soon we will be able to use almost everything from our crops for human consumption, and we think this is really contributing to sustainable development.
And is there any timeline for this?
Yeah, so the sustainability agenda is set until 2030 with, let's say the intermediate targets, and the long-term approach, of course, is to get net carbon neutrality in 2050.
Thank you very much, Rutger.
Thank you.
