The move toward naturalness is the strongest trend in the food and beverage sector, resulting in stronger demand for natural and fruit-derived flavors. Among the best natural flavors are products isolated solely from the botanically authentic fruit or plant, so-called FTNF/FTNJ/FTNS (from the named fruit/juice/source) flavors. These natural fruit extracts comprise water phases/essences, flavor fractions, isolates and extracts of the individual fruits, plants and sources.
A Range of Technologies Ingredients derived from natural sources are always a challenge in terms of consistent qualities. Flavor components can vary from harvest to harvest. To guarantee consistent FTNF/FTNJ/FTNS flavors and compositional flavors, state-of-the art separation technologies are used. Otherwise, much flavor gets lost to solid material during its separation from juice, followed by pressing or centrifuging.
Vacuum distillation is used for sophisticated separation tasks at gentle temperatures, producing, e.g., water phases and essential oils. Liquid-liquid extraction allows for the extraction of valuable components of essential oils at low temperatures. In solid-phase extraction (chromatography), appropriate stationary phases are used to process the different raw materials in order to produce final isolates and flavors with specific characteristics. Molecular distillation employs a special setup of a condensing system, which results in an efficient distillation of high-boiling components at very low pressures and temperatures.