Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets

So under pressure to clean up their act, many food manufacturers have latched on to the emerging concept of ‘clean label’. In the last decade, this is the big idea that has moved from the health-store margins of the food industry to grip the mainstream. The term has no legal definition, but in the industry, ‘clean label’ is widely taken to mean that the ancien régime of food additives, with all its negative connotations, has been replaced or removed, that the ingredient listing is simple, that is, made up of recognisable ingredients that do not sound chemical or artificial, and that the product has been processed ‘using traditional techniques that are understood by consumers and not perceived as being artificial’. As the director of one market research company put it, the word ‘natural’ ‘works as a heuristic to shoppers, a shortcut to a product being good for them, something they’d be happy to give their children’.

Some companies have taken up the clean label concept to reformulate their products in a genuine, wholehearted way, replacing ingredients and additives that raise health or quality concerns with substitutes that are generally thought to be less problematic. Other companies, however, unconvinced that they can pass on the cost of radical reformulation to food retailers and consumers, have turned to a novel range of substances that allow them to present a much more scrubbed and rosy face to the public, without incurring excessive cost. In their hands, clean labelling has become an exercise that dispenses with the services of the food industry’s dirty dozens, and introduces us to an initially more wholesome and healthy-looking bunch of new friends.

The challenge faced by companies under pressure to reformulate products has been to find alternative ingredients that can perform the same functions as the old ‘nasties’ – that is, they must cost less than the natural equivalent, have a good shelf life and be easy to process – but can be described in a much more appetising way. In this endeavour, food manufacturers look to a plethora of global ingredient supply companies that understand their technical needs and provide clean label solutions to the food manufacturer’s dirty little label problems. In the industry’s own terminology, these solutions aim to square the consumer’s yearning for naturalness with the manufacturer’s need for ‘functionality’. In practical terms, what this means is that even if you are a thoughtful eater, someone who diligently inspects product labels, food manufacturers are always one step ahead of you. In fact, if you are still fretting about E numbers, you are way behind the curve. That was food awareness reading book number one; now we are on to reading book number two.

Supposing, for example, you were standing in the supermarket eyeing up a pot of something temptingly called a ‘chocolate cream dessert’. You read the ingredients: whole milk, sugar (well, there has to be some in there), cream, cocoa powder and dark chocolate (they all sound quite up-market), but then your urge to buy falters as you notice three feel-bad ingredients. The first of these is carrageenan (E407). You may or may not have read headlines reporting that this setting agent, derived from seaweed, has been linked with ulcers and gastrointestinal cancer, but even if you haven’t, there’s a good chance that the E number will put you off anyway. Carrageenan belongs to a group of gummy substances, including guar, agar, konjac, inulin, locust bean, acacia, xanthan, cellulose and pectin, known as hydrocolloids. It is now regarded in food industry circles as an ‘ideally not’ [to be included] additive.

The second of these worrying ingredients is a modified starch (E1422), or to give it its full chemical name, acetylated distarch adipate. It started off its life as a simple starch, of the kind you’d find naturally in potatoes or rice, but it has been chemically altered to increase its water-holding capacity and tolerance for the extreme temperatures and physical pressures of industrial-scale processing. Spot this, and chances are that the term ‘modified’ will put you off, and if it doesn’t, then the bothersome E number most likely will.

The third problematical ingredient is gelatine. It’s anathema to observant Muslims, Jews and vegetarians, and even secular omnivores may be wondering what this by-product of porcine hides is doing in their pudding.

Fortunately for the manufacturers of your chocolate cream dessert, there is a Plan B. They can remove all three offending items, and replace them with a more sophisticated type of ‘functional flour’ hydrothermally extracted from cereals, that will do the same job, but without the need for E numbers. ‘Because they are flours’ explains the sales pitch for one such product, ‘all our ingredients produce home-made and additive-free textures with a touch of authenticity to make products stand out from the crowd … Our functional flours have a reassuring declaration as ‘wheat’, ‘corn’ or ‘rice’ flour – simple ingredients familiar to everyone.’

Another possibility for cleaning up this dessert would be to use a ‘co-texturiser’ that would cost-effectively deliver the necessary thick and creamy indulgence factor. As the supplier of one such product puts it: ‘They bring out the more subtle differences in texture that we experience in our mouths while eating, such as mouthcoating and meltaway.’ Texturisers, just like modified starches, are based on highly processed, altered starch designed to withstand high-volume, high-temperature, high-pressure manufacturing, but because they are obligingly classified by food regulators as a ‘functional native starch’, they can be labelled simply as ‘starch’, with no troublesome E number at the end.

So, out come two additives and one ingredient that many people avoid, to be replaced by a single new generation ingredient, one that is opaque in its formulation – proprietary secrets, and all that – but which won’t trigger consumer alarm.

With the chocolate dessert in your trolley, you find yourself at the deli counter. Fancy a dip for dunking your nachos? Possibly not, if you noticed that they contained an old-school preservative with an E number after its incomprehensible name, something such as sodium benzoate, or sorbate, nitrites, nitrates and sulfites. Not only do these sound like science lab chemicals, you might also have heard that several of them have been linked to ADD, allergies and cancer. But food manufacturers can get round your resistance by using instead a label-friendly preservative, made by fermenting corn or cane sugar with specific cultures that form organic acids and fermentation products; these have a similar bacteria-inhibiting effect. The boon here for the manufacturer is that they can be labelled as ‘cultured cane/corn syrup’, or ‘cultured vinegar’, and that sounds positively classy.

Maybe you usually buy some cold cooked meat, turkey perhaps, or ham? It’s always useful for sandwiches and easy meals. Food-wise shoppers tend to be doubly vigilant while shopping in this category. Hanky-panky in the meat department always has potential to trigger a yuck reaction, and the presence of phosphates on a label is widely interpreted as an ominous sign. It provides evidence of meat that has been swollen by injecting it, or ‘tumbling’ it in a drum, with bulking chemicals and water. So processed meat manufacturers are increasingly turning to clean label ‘phosphate replacers’, sticky, binding substances derived from tapioca and other starchy foods, that do the job of retaining added water, but allow a chemical-free label. Observant shoppers might notice the presence of tapioca starch on the ingredients list, and wonder vaguely how a tropical tuber got into their sliced ham, but it sounds a whole lot more cuddly than sodium/potassium/calcium/ammonium polyphosphate E452.

Picking up some rustic-looking salami, even the most guarded shoppers might relax when they notice rosemary extract on the ingredients list. We’d love to believe that this cured meat has been lovingly aromatised with fragrant herbs. Actually, rosemary extracts are clean label substitutes for the old guard of techie-sounding antioxidants (E300-21), such as butylhydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylhydroxytoluene (BHT). Food manufacturers use them to slow down the rate at which foods go rancid, so extending their shelf life; basically, they act as preservatives.

Rosemary extracts do have an E number (E392) but manufacturers prefer to label them more poetically as ‘extract of rosemary’, and lose the offending E, because that way they sound like lovingly made Slow Food ingredients, especially if they are also labelled as natural or organic. Never believe for a moment that this antioxidant in your salami is there to provide an aromatic herbiness: its role is to stop the meat discolouring in air so that it retains that desirable fresh appearance for weeks.

Rosemary extracts do, at one stage of their production process, have something to do with the eponymous herb, albeit usually in its dried, rather than fresh, form. However, the herb’s antioxidant chemicals (phenolic diterpenes called carnosol and carnosic acid) are isolated in an extraction procedure that ‘deodorises’ them, that is to say, removes any rosemary taste and smell. Extraction is done either by the supercritical fluid-extraction method, which uses carbon dioxide, or using chemical solvents. The solvents in question are hexane (derived from the fractional distillation of petroleum), ethanol (a petrol replacer from the fermentation of sugar and starch), and acetone (the flammable pungent fluid that dissolves nail varnish). Neutral-tasting rosemary extract is then sold to manufacturers, usually in the form of a brownish powder. In short, the connection that rosemary extract has with the freshly cut, green and pungent herb we know and love is considerably more remote than we might like to think.

As you make your way up and down the aisles, note how that word ‘extract’ increasingly features on ingredient listings; not just rosemary either, but carrot, paprika, beetroot and more. What, exactly, are they doing in your breakfast cereals, your lunchtime sandwich and your evening ready meal? Unlike rosemary, they are used as clean label colourings. Carrot extract, for instance, is popular in food manufacturing because it lends a golden hue to everything from ready-made custard and cakes to salad dressings and yogurts. Food manufacturers can buy it in various shades, such as ‘warm orange’ or ‘shining yellow’. The process of obtaining it starts with real carrots in some form, not necessarily fresh or whole. The natural orange colour, carotene, is extracted in a similar process to rosemary extract. If manufacturers want a dash of red colour to make their yogurt look fruitier and more berried, they can use extract of beetroot (betanin), or grapes (anthocyanins). For a brownish-red, safflower extract will do the job, or if you’re after more of a cool, cosmopolitan cappuccino, there’s malt extract.

Extracts sound so much nicer than that abrasive word ‘colouring’, and they play well with the health-conscious shopper who has picked up a few key words, such as anthocyanins, from the health pages of magazines. They come over a bit like added-value, vitality-boosting superfood compounds, something you might buy as a food supplement from a health food store, and hold a particularly strong appeal for the mother who frets about what’s in her toddler’s snack pack. Sometimes carrot or paprika extract is labelled as ‘mixed carotenes’, and that term has a glowing halo of health. After all, it has something to do with carrots, hasn’t it? And we all know that vegetables are good for us. Maybe beetroot extract is actually a nifty idea from food manufacturers to help parents con their children into eating nutritious vegetables without them knowing it? Actually, that assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. No extract has a nutritional profile that comes anywhere close to that of the source vegetable or fruit in its whole, raw state, because the extraction process ruins it. Furthermore, extracts are supplied to manufacturers in different forms – powder, liquid, oil, and emulsion – with other additives in the mix, such as maltodextrin and modified starch as carriers and emulsifiers, or the preservative potassium sorbate, or in a handy sugar syrup with propylene glycol, a solvent, better known for its anti-freeze effect. Nice idea though it is, extracts make absolutely no contribution to your five-a-day.

If extracts won’t do the trick, another handy new form of colouring that doesn’t sound like colouring sneaks on to the label in the form of micronised powders. These are plant foods dried and pulverised into particles that are only a few microns in diameter. Broccoli powder provides green, cranberry powder provides red and, as with extracts, the mention of healthy fruit or vegetables will help make even a packet of sweets look as if it is positively brimming with goodness.

As clean label extracts and powders colonise product labels, one additive with bad PR that is less and less to be seen is E150 caramel, formerly food manufacturers’ go-to prop for imbuing products with sweet flavour and brown colour. It is being replaced with clean label ‘burnt caramelised sugar’, ‘caramelised sugar syrup’, ‘burnt sugar syrup’ and ‘caramelised sugar’. Although these substances give a similar effect to unpopular old E150, they aren’t classed as food additives, but as ingredients, so no E number is required. Even when they are being used purely for food colouring purposes, they need only be declared as ‘plain caramel’, words that evoke the image of something you’d make at home for a toothsome crème caramel. As one supplier explains:

Our caramelised sugar syrups offer a range of sweet to burnt notes, compatibility with caramel colors, high-alcohol solubility in spirits and liqueurs, processing stability in salt, flavor enhancer capabilities, natural products opportunities, clean-label benefits; may be labeled as ‘sugar’. Caramelised sugar syrups provide both flavor and color in one blend.

Weighing up the products on sale in the bakery department – will it be this loaf or those rolls? – the mention of emulsifiers such as soy lecithin, or mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E471), might not do much to recommend a product to you. After all, they don’t figure in any home baker’s recipe. Thinking clean label, manufacturers can switch to rice extract made by modifying rice bran with protease enzymes; these perform the same task of binding oil and water in the dough. The word enzyme would not have to appear on the ingredients listing; a more label-friendly ‘rice extract’ would suffice. A further bonus, as the maker of one such rice product says, is that such ingredients ‘can improve a manufacturer’s bottom line by eliminating or reducing many common production problems’. Specifically, ‘the cost saving is immediate by allowing formulations to contain more water, reducing the use of costlier ingredients, improving output and reducing breakage’. However much consumers are preoccupied with trying to keep down their food bills, rest assured, food manufacturers are every bit as keenly focused on reducing theirs.

Still not sure what you’re going to eat for dinner? Why not backtrack to the ready-meal aisle and pick up something instant and tasty – a chicken noodle dish, perhaps, maybe a pizza. If you noticed that it contained an amino acid, such as L-cysteine E910, your enthusiasm might wane, especially if you were a clued-up vegan who happens to know that this additive can be derived from animal and human hair. L-cysteine has been an extremely useful additive for food manufacturers. In your pizza, it acts as a dough ‘conditioner’ (strengthener). In your chicken noodles, it brings a meaty, savoury flavour to the table. But its presence on a label is something of an embarrassment to processing companies these days, so a range of new-wave yeast extracts is increasingly replacing it. One supplier of such extracts markets its products to food manufacturers as follows:

This range offers you a variety of pre-composed, ready-to-use products that provide the same intensity as our classical process flavors … but … are labeled as all-natural. Ingredients are available in chicken and beef flavor, with roasted or boiled varieties, as well as white meat and dark roast.

These hi-tech yeast extracts equip manufacturers with the range of meaty, caramelised, barbecued, brothy, roasted ‘middle block flavours’ they are accustomed to working with. There are quite a few to choose from, depending on the nature of the food in question, and the impact required. A manufacturer can add a little touch of an extract that brings a ‘brothy, white meaty, sweet umami enhancement’, or ramp up the flavour with another that promises ‘natural roast sulphury chicken aroma notes’. Both can be labelled as ‘yeast extract’ without any mention that they are being used as flavourings. That’s quite a boon to manufacturers, because yeast extracts have a healthy image, particularly amongst vegetarians, as a rich source of B vitamins. Less well known is the fact that yeast extract has a high concentration of the amino acid glutamate, from which monosodium glutamate – better known as MSG, one of the most shunned additives – is derived. In other words, yeast extract is just another member of the meaty, muscular, flavour-enhancing glutamate clan. A case of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, by any chance?

As you wend your way up and down supermarket aisles these days, it is certainly becoming easier to let your guard drop. Food manufacturers now seem to understand our concerns and increasingly speak to us in a coaxing language we want to hear. They offer us products that appear to be reformed, reconstructed, improved versions of their predecessors. These come plastered with tick lists and upbeat front-of-pack claims, and when we turn them over, their ingredients listings seem relatively short and sweet. Descriptions such as ‘natural’ and ‘additive-free’ get us to suspend our disbelief and keep buying; they trigger a positive why-bother-cooking sentiment in us. As one executive in a leading ingredients supply company put it: ‘Ingredients that give the impression [my emphasis] that they originated in a grandmother’s kitchen and have not been processed too harshly are of great appeal to consumers.’

Whether the clean label campaign is indeed a heart and soul effort by food manufacturers to respond to our desire for more wholesome, less mucked around with food, or just a self-interested substitution exercise, is a matter of opinion. Additives and ingredients presented as benign one day have a habit of looking less innocent the next as we learn more about the means by which they were created, and how they affect our health. In the meantime, it is worth noting that clean label is not causing assembly lines to grind to a halt, use-by dates to shorten, or production rates to dwindle. Neither is there any evidence that food manufacturers are using greater quantities of the real, natural ingredients that consumers want to eat. Thus far, clean label looks less like a thorough spring clean of factory food than a superficial tidy-up, with the most embarrassing mess stuffed in the cupboard behind a firmly shut door, where hopefully no-one will notice it.

4

At the food makers’ market (#u15b32a08-a063-52a7-8316-63680b172a5c)

Where do the companies that manufacture our processed food do their shopping? The European marketplace for this business is an annual trade show called Food Ingredients. Under one roof, over three days, this exhibition hosts the world’s most important gathering of ingredient suppliers, distributors and buyers. Think of it as the food manufacturer’s equivalent of an arms fair.

At Food Ingredients, the buyers, representatives of companies that make our ready meals and convenience foods, meet sellers with imposing job titles – Global Procurement Ingredients Director, European Lead Buyer and Innovation Partner, R&D Product Developer, Ingredient Specification Technologist, Product and Application Development Manager, Formulation Project Leader – who present them with the ‘personalised solutions they need to grow and nurture their business’.

Food Ingredients represents the beating heart of the modern food industry, showcasing its very latest innovations and trends, and its dialogue is thoroughly international. In 2011, when it was held in Paris, over 23,000 visitors attended from 154 countries – industry movers and shakers who collectively represented an ingredient buying power of €4 billion.

Consistent with the industry view that the general public is best given only the sketchiest notion of what goes on behind the scenes of food processing, Food Ingredients events aren’t open to the general public. Anyone who tries to register has to show that they work in food manufacturing but, using a fake ID, I managed to register for Food Ingredients 2013. It was housed in the vast, eerie expanses of Frankfurt’s Blade Runner-like Festhalle Messe, a fitting venue that mirrors the sheer scale of modern food manufacturing.

For those who love to cook and eat, food trade exhibitions are sometimes alienating, disillusioning experiences, a through-the-keyhole insight into aspects of food production you’d rather not know about, but Food Ingredients had a surreal quality all of its own. I wasn’t greeted by the smell of food, and hardly anything on display much resembled it. While exhibitors at most food exhibitions are often keen for you to taste their products, at Food Ingredients, few of the stand-holders had anything instantly edible to offer. That’s possibly something to do with the fact that their potential customers, while prepared to buy the products on display for manufacturing, don’t much fancy eating them.

And even the foods at those stands that did want visitors to taste something weren’t all that they seemed. Canapé-style cubes of white cheese dusted with herbs and spices sat under a bistro-style blackboard that nonchalantly read ‘Feta, with Glucono-Delta-Lactone’; the latter ingredient is, apparently, a ‘cyclic ester of gluconic acid’ that acts as an acidifier, thus prolonging shelf life. A pastry chef in gleaming whites was rounding off his live demonstration by offering sample petit fours to the buyers who had gathered. His dainty heart- and diamond-shaped cakes were dead ringers for those neat layers of sponge, glossy fruit jelly, foamy cream and chocolate you’d see in the window of a classy patisserie, but were made entirely without eggs, butter or cream, thanks to the crafty substitution of potato protein isolate. This revolutionary ingredient is ‘tailored to the required functionality: foaming, emulsifying, or gelling’ and provides ‘the volume, texture, stability and mouthfeel’ we look for in classic cakes, baked with traditional ingredients.

Many exhibitors had striking visual displays, arranged like installations at an art gallery. Gleaming glass shelves were back-lit to show off a rainbow of super-sized phials of liquids so bright with colouring, they might be neon. Plates of various powders, shaped into pyramids, were artistically stacked on elegant Perspex stands bearing enigmatic labels, such as ‘texturised soy protein: minced ham colour’, or displayed in cabinets, as though they were exhibits in a museum.

Walls were given over to geometric displays of powdery substances, from white, through beige and brown to orange in hue, each bearing an alphanumeric code, and glowing white, yet cryptic captions that read ‘pork skin products’, ‘beef products’, or similar. One porthole-sized convex glass round housed a liquid that captured the hue of harbour water on a dark night, another framed a solitary blueberry muffin. I had to keep reminding myself that this wasn’t some art college end-of-term show though, because these intriguing objects were, according to the explanatory signage, ‘solutions for coating, glazing, polishing, releasing, emulsifying’. Still unsure what, exactly, I was looking at, the further information ‘flavour vehicles’, ‘MCT oils’ and ‘pan oil’ didn’t hugely enlighten me.

Seeing a plate of puce-striped, chocolate-coated granola bars centre stage in a glass case, my initial reaction was that some avant-garde artist was making an ironic comment on modern life, like Carl André’s controversial floor of bricks at the Tate Gallery. But then I read the notice: ‘cereal bar with compound coating: oil-dispersible technology of ‘plain’ caramel colour and beetroot red’, and realised that everyone else was taking them deadly seriously.

Perhaps the most beautifully curated artefacts on display were vases containing glowing orange liquids – some cloudy, some crystal clear – for colouring fruit juices. One looked particularly spectacular, like a lava lamp with ghostly threads of gossamer-like material suspended evenly in it. These were ‘orange cells’: they come in handy, apparently, for making those cartons of juice composed of pasteurised orange concentrate and water look as though they contain some freshly squeezed juice.

In the absence of any sight or smell to whet the appetite, a lay visitor to Food Ingredients, one who was not part of the food manufacturing fraternity, might feel the need to double check that they were indeed at a food exhibition. For Food Ingredients is so clearly the domain of a technocracy of engineers and scientists, people whose natural environment is the laboratory and the factory, not the kitchen, the farm or the field, people who share the assumption that everything nature can do, man can do so much better, and more profitably.

The broad business interest portfolio of the companies exhibiting at Food Ingredients was disconcerting. For instance, the Swiss company DKSH, whose sales pitch is ‘performance materials, concepts and ingredients for the confectionery and bakery industry’, described itself as ‘a leading speciality chemicals and ingredients supplier’. Its business interests span ‘speciality chemicals, food and beverage industry, pharmaceutical industry, and the personal care industry’.

Omya, which seemed proud to be based in Hamburg because it is ‘the largest chemical trading place in the world’, announced itself as ‘a leading global chemical distributor and producer of industrial minerals’. The company reeled off its list of markets as food, pet food, oleochemicals, cosmetics, personal care, detergents, cleaners, papers, adhesives, construction, plastics, and industrial chemicals. Omya was at Food Ingredients selling products as diverse as granular onion powder, monosodium glutamate and phosphoric acid.