The breakthrough of a new kind of natural colours could main to more lively and stable colourings for foods and beverages.

Anthocyanins are used generally in the food and beverage industry, and until now, have been assumed of as the leading pigments of plants, providing colour to flowers, fruit, and flora and helping keep against ecological hassles. However, academics at the New Zealand Plant and Food Research Institute claim to have revealed a new class of plant pigment, which they have named “auronidins”.

Auronidins are flavonoids with similar colors to anthocyanins, but different chemistry, including durable fluorescence, they wrote in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). 

Similar to anthocyanins, auronidins incline to be red within plant cells, but in liquid, they are capable to produce a larger range of colors, from yellow to red and orange and even purple, depending on acidity. Anthocyanins incline toward a narrower range of red spectrum colors in the conditions typical of foods.

The discovery could lead scientists to rethink the evolution of plant pigments, and also open new possibilities for colouring foods and drinks. If auronidins are able to be used in this way, the New Zealand researchers’ work in understanding how plants make the pigments is likely to be useful in producing them at a commercial scale.

According to Mintel data, global use of natural colours overtook synthetic in value terms in 2011, and more than 90% of new European product launches have been naturally coloured since 2012. Despite this overwhelming uptake of natural pigments, challenges still remain – among them the very vibrancy and stability issues that auronidins promise to address.

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