GNT expands colour application push

GNT is expanding its application-led work for Exberry plant-based colours, with new product concepts and regional technical support highlighting the growing complexity of natural colour formulation.

The company is showcasing colour systems across bakery, confectionery, snacks, and related food formats, including snack pairings designed to demonstrate how colour influences visual expectation, contrast, and product identity. The work follows wider international expansion, including a sales and application office in Shanghai supporting manufacturers using Exberry colours in China.

Exberry colours are made from non-GMO fruits, vegetables, and plants using physical processing methods and water. Their industrial value depends on formulation, process compatibility, and stability as much as label appeal. Natural colours can behave differently under heat, light, pH, water activity, fat systems, and storage conditions, making technical support increasingly important at large scale.

The application work spans savoury and sweet products, with concepts using bright, contrasting colour cues across snacks, dips, crackers, shortbread, hummus, and gummies. Behind the creative formats is a practical manufacturing shift: colour is moving earlier into product development instead of being treated as a late cosmetic adjustment. Earlier integration can reduce late-stage reformulation risk where colour stability has to be validated through processing, packaging, and shelf life.

GNT’s Shanghai application laboratory supports concept development, formulation work, customer training, and stability testing in a market where clean-label and plant-based colour demand is growing. China’s classification of certain concentrates as Coloring Foods also creates a different declaration and compliance environment for manufacturers compared with conventional additive systems.

The wider colour market is becoming more complicated. Political and regulatory pressure around synthetic dyes has intensified in the US, while European markets already operate under stricter expectations for artificial colours in many categories. Global manufacturers must manage products sold across jurisdictions with different consumer expectations, labelling rules, and permitted colour systems.

Confectionery and snack production are particularly exposed because colour is closely tied to flavour recognition, brand identity, and product navigation. A red gummy, blue dip, pink filling, or golden cracker does more than decorate the product. It signals taste, occasion, novelty, and sometimes naturalness or nutritional cues. Replacing or modifying colour systems can therefore affect more than the ingredient list.

Clean-label snack development is already drawing colour, raw material choice, and processing behaviour together, with blue masa flour being promoted for gluten-free snack applications. GNT’s work follows the same direction, where visual differentiation is tied to ingredient provenance, process behaviour, and finished-product stability.

Stability remains the critical test. Plant-based colours may need different handling depending on application. Acidic gummies, baked biscuits, extruded snacks, high-fat fillings, dairy-based systems, and water-based dips all create different stresses. Thermal processing, oxygen exposure, light transmission through packaging, and storage temperature can all determine whether the intended colour remains acceptable through shelf life.

Application support has become a strategic service rather than a sales add-on. Manufacturers need to understand how a colour behaves in their own recipe, on their own line, and in their own packaging format. A formulation that performs well in a bench sample may behave differently at industrial scale, particularly where heat transfer, mixing intensity, residence time, and packaging atmosphere change.

Colour reformulation can also interact with wider product development priorities. Sugar reduction, fibre enrichment, protein fortification, fat reformulation, and clean-label preservative changes can alter base colour, opacity, and stability. Colour suppliers are increasingly drawn into development programmes where the colour system must work alongside flavour, texture, nutrition, and shelf-life targets.

GNT’s latest activity reflects a shift from replacement chemistry into application engineering. Natural colour systems are now being judged by how reliably they perform under factory conditions, across regional regulations, and throughout the product’s commercial shelf life.