IN Brief:
- FDA has accepted GNT’s safflower color additive petition for filing, allowing formal review to proceed.
- The proposed concentrate is water soluble and intended to provide yellow shades across multiple food and beverage applications.
- No US approval has yet been granted, and permitted uses will depend on the FDA’s final determination.
GNT has had its safflower color additive petition accepted for filing by the US Food and Drug Administration, allowing formal regulatory review of the plant-derived yellow concentrate to proceed across a proposed range of food and beverage uses.
Acceptance for filing does not amount to approval. It indicates that the FDA considers the petition sufficiently complete to enter formal review, after which the agency will determine whether the evidence supports the proposed uses and what conditions, if any, should apply.
The petition covers applications including soft drinks and teas, confectionery, frozen desserts, dairy and dairy alternatives, cereals and snacks, dressings, pickled vegetables, and other selected food categories.
GNT already supplies safflower-derived colour in markets outside the United States through its EXBERRY portfolio. In Europe, safflower concentrate is treated as a Coloring Food and is used in applications including beverages and confectionery, but that existing market history does not create an automatic route into US food production.
US regulation generally treats substances intentionally added to impart colour as color additives requiring FDA approval before they can be marketed for that purpose. A successful petition therefore has to establish the identity of the colour source, intended applications, expected exposure, manufacturing information, technical performance, and safety under the proposed conditions of use.
GNT says its submission contains data covering the safflower source, the compounds responsible for colour, proposed applications, exposure, stability, and safety. The company has described the regulatory work as the result of almost a decade of research and evaluation.
Jeannette O’Brien, vice president of sales and marketing at GNT USA, said the filing involved “significant investment and nearly a decade of research and safety evaluation.”
The technical proposition is based on a water-soluble yellow concentrate made from safflower petals. GNT says the colour provides good stability against pH, heat, and light, characteristics that can be important in applications where processing conditions or shelf exposure cause conventional plant-derived colours to shift or fade.
Water solubility is particularly relevant to beverages. A colouring ingredient used in a clear drink must disperse consistently without creating unwanted haze or sediment, while maintaining the intended shade through processing, packaging, storage, and the product’s stated shelf life.
The same ingredient behaves differently in other foods. Dairy systems contain protein and fat, confectionery may experience concentrated sugar and heat, frozen desserts pass through freezing and storage cycles, and dressings can contain emulsions and acidic conditions. Approval would therefore create a regulatory option rather than remove the need for application-specific validation.
Safflower-derived yellow can also be used as part of colour blends. GNT says it can contribute to orange and green shades when combined with other plant-derived colours, giving developers another building block when attempting to reproduce established product appearances with alternative colouring systems.
Alice Lee, technical marketing manager at GNT USA, said the concentrate’s water-soluble properties would allow manufacturers to use it alone or in blends across a broader spectrum of shades. Product developers would still have to establish how those combinations behave in their own recipes and processes.
Colour selection in food manufacturing has consequences beyond aesthetics. Consumers associate particular shades with flavour, ripeness, strength, or product identity, while production teams need colour systems that can tolerate raw-material variation and repeat the target appearance from batch to batch.
Changing a colour source can therefore require reformulation work around dosage, pH, processing temperature, storage, packaging, and interactions with other ingredients. A substitute that performs well in one drink or confectionery system may require a different concentration or supporting formulation in another.
The FDA review will focus first on whether the safflower concentrate is safe for the requested uses. If the petition succeeds, the resulting regulation would define the authorised conditions rather than provide unrestricted approval for any safflower-derived colouring in any food.
That distinction keeps the current development firmly at the regulatory-review stage. GNT has cleared an important procedural hurdle, but US food and beverage manufacturers cannot yet use the petition as evidence that the concentrate is approved.
For formulation teams, the potential value lies in another plant-based yellow source with reported water solubility and processing stability. Whether it becomes a commercial US ingredient now depends on the FDA’s assessment — and, after that, on whether manufacturers can make it perform consistently on real production lines rather than simply in a colour swatch.
