International influences. U.S.-based ingredient suppliers report that they're inspired by or are borrowing more ideas for gum applications from Asia- and Europe-based manufacturers - especially, for instance, in beverages.
New products
The most spectacular new applications of gums and gum systems are coming in the creation of entire new foods. A prime example is Hercules Inc.'s development of a new spoonable dessert, a fruit-flavored flan for which carrageenan provides the characteristic texture and a pectin formulation gives the required stability. The acidified fruit desserts have a creamy, somewhat cuttable texture typical of a neutral-flavored flan. They would be packaged in a cup, like yogurt, but are much firmer than yogurt. The carrageenan used is rather unique since it is much more stable at low pH levels compared with other types, which tend to break down.
"This carrageenan retains the gel structure better within the flan, based on our approach to processing and selecting the raw material - seaweed," says Martin Sapone, industry manager for Wilmington, DE-based Hercules.
Another new application that Sapone describes is an instant, liquid-based dairy dessert that could be either refrigerated or made shelf-stable in a pouch, retort container or squeeze bottle. A consumer would mix the fruit-flavored liquid syrup with equal parts milk and stir, and within 15 seconds the combination would produce pudding-like textures.
"Knowing how children like to play with their foods, we believe this is something that they could stir around and mix up and have fun with," Sapone says. "You can visualize that just about every consumer has a quart of milk in their refrigerator anyway. It could be appropriate for parents who want to put together something quick, who make a last-minute decision about dessert right on the spot."
A pectin gum is the basis of that product. Controlling calcium reactivity in the system is key as well, Sapone says, as the pectin reacts with the calcium from milk. "We can control the texture and the degree of firmness by selecting the appropriate pectin based on its reactivity with calcium," he explains.
Similarly, Hercules has been developing what Sapone calls an "instant gel-snack" that could utilize orange, pineapple, grapefruit or some other juice that consumers commonly have in their refrigerator. Mixing equal parts pectin-based syrup and the juice of choice would create a dessert with a "fruit-cup texture, a bit softer than jam or jelly," he says.
New textures
With new gums and gum systems, FMC's Food Ingredients Division, Philadelphia, is formulating potential new products with unusual textures, as well. "We're following through on the trends toward convenient, ready-to-eat-type products that are portable, handy to take to school, lunch or work," says Jeff Dopf, market segment manager for gels and emulsions.
"We're trying to look outside the box and see what the consumer is willing to accept," Dopf adds. "That's the approach we're taking: What can we do with these gums?"
One such idea is a multi-textured dessert that might involve separate layers of, say, pudding, mousse and flavored gelatin. By manipulating gum systems that involve carrageenan and gelatin, Dopf explains, FMC can design the layers to set in about 30 minutes at room temperatures. Because they wouldn't require refrigeration during production, processors could manufacture and distribute this product relatively easily.
Another, albeit long-shot, notion that FMC is exploring is a very chewy gel that the company would hope to find application in an end product that consumers would treat much like chewing gum.
"It would require more effort to chew than a typical gelatin-based product," Dopf explains, "but after maybe six to 10 chews it would just dissolve and break down, and then you pick up another cube."
At the heart of such a product would be a combination of carrageenan and FMC's new gums made from konjac flour. The dried tuber of the konjac plant contains about 30% to 50% glucomannan gum. Konjac flour is obtained by grinding dried slices of the tuber, then separating the glucomannan-containing sacs from the surrounding starchy materials.
Konjac swells and hydrates, even at room temperature, to form highly viscous aqueous sols. Heat-stable konjac gels form when set with alkali and heat. The gels are acid- and salt-stable. Konjac develops higher viscosity than guar gum or locust bean gum at comparable use levels, FMC says. Dopf says that konjac also "tends to make products a lot more stretchable."
It also is synergistic with certain other hydrocolloids, such as carrageenan. "Konjac in combination with other gums offers stability in a gel system, whereas typical gel systems will tend to melt," he says.
Dopf says that combinations of konjac and other gums also are providing FMC with new and unique textures for water-dessert gels, such as shelf-stable gels that typically are formulated with konjac, carrageenan and locust bean gum. These gels are stronger and more brittle than typical gelatin-based gels that have long been popular in the United States.
FMC believes it's possible that some of its applications may even one-up Gummi bears. For example, the company is developing a heat-stable candy that uses carrageenan.
"That's important for distribution of these types of products, especially during the summer months," Dopf adds. "It can get quite warm in the trucks. And do you want to have the opportunity for your consumer to eat the product at the beach in 90-degree weather, or are they going to open up the bag and have it be just a lump?"
Foreign influence
That FMC is experimenting with such textures owes much to the fact that the company looks to Asia and Europe for new gum-application ideas, and it helps that the company has labs in Brussels, Belgium; and Singapore. In Asia, for example, "they're much more innovative with different texture variations and combinations of konjac with tara, locust bean gum and other stuff," Dopf says. "Those are the textures we're just starting to get into in this country."
Another new application that owes a big debt to Asia is Systems Bio-Industries (SBI) Inc.'s formulation of new fruit-flavored dairy beverages that use pectins to stabilize combinations of juice and dairy products. Such beverages are common in Europe, as well as Asia, says James Carr, Ph.D., director of SBI's research and development center in Waukesha, WI.
"Milk or yogurt bases combined with juices are very popular abroad. They span the spectrum from thick-bodied European drinkable yogurt products to light, refreshing, predominantly juice-based beverages especially popular in Asia," Carr says.
In the U.S., he adds, early market introductions tended to be the heavy-bodied or more viscous varieties, such as drinkable yogurts. But SBI believes that using its pectin stabilizers such as those used by Asian companies will enable the development of light, fruit-flavored dairy drinks that will prove popular with Americans.
The technological hurdle such products face generally has been that products in which acidic fruit juices and dairy products are combined at high temperatures are inherently unstable because of strong self-association of the milk proteins and their subsequent dehydration, Carr says. But the pectins SBI has developed allow for very high-performance stabilization, allowing for the suspension of casein micelles, preventing flocculation and sedimentation of casein at lower usage rates.
These "acid-dairy" pectin systems also allow for a wider variety of textural modifications and lighter-textured products that still have a viscous impact on mouthfeel. That's because the pectin system can also be selected to yield the desired mouthfeel properties. That means it is now possible to develop a wider range of products in this category than ever before.
Carr says other applications of the same pectin-based technology include stabilizing casein in fresh cheese products, shelf-stable cheesecakes, acidified dips and products where pH levels are reduced by fermentation or direct acidification. "Wherever there are milk proteins and acids together, as in certain cheese systems or yogurt systems that are thermally treated, pectin-based stabilizers can provide proper protection," he says.
Even the fluid-gel technology that underlies Orbitz owes its inspiration to the Orient, according to Hartnek of NutraSweet Kelco. For at least five years, Japanese companies have been using gellan gum to make drinks containing gellan cubes about 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick.
"They slowly sip this drink until they get to these clear cubes, or beads, with different textures and then crush them with their tongues," Hartnek says. "If you hold a bottle of the drink up and don't look closely, it looks like clear liquid. Yet there are cubes of what basically are like Jell-O in there."
NutraSweet Kelco took the Japanese notion several steps further by working with gellan systems that not only maintain their separate textures within a beverage, but also suspend particulates composed of lots of different materials - say, spices or juice pulp pieces, in addition to gellan beads - in the beverage.
"With a certain balance of gellan and certain sodium or calcium salts, we could form a gel that is very shear-thinning," Hartnek says. "You could pour it and stir it and it's virtually like water, with a little viscosity. But as soon as that stirring is stopped, the gellan then is allowed to form a very loose gel network, and that's what supports the suspension of particulates like the gellan beads."
On film
Often gums serve as texturizers and thickeners. However, one property of gums that lends itself to unique applications is their film-forming abilities. Hydrating and drying a thin gel of certain gums can form a structure known as a film. Depending on the gum used and other formulation variables such as pH or the presence of certain reactive agents, these films can show a wide range of attributes such as heat stability or reversibility, permeability and even appearance. These may supply several opportunities to create new and improved food products.
"If you pour a gel formed by a gum in a thin film you can form a very good plastic film," says Florian Ward, Ph.D., director, research and development, TIC Gums, Inc., Belcamp, MD. "You may have to add a plasticizer such as dextrin or a polyol. But that allows you to increase the flexibility and helps the film to retain moisture. Using this technology, we have developed films that still maintain their flexibility after two years."
Among the more innovative ideas is the University of Maine's development of a gum system to prevent the bleeding of individually quick-frozen low-bush blueberries in blueberry muffins. In contrast with high-bush berries, which are larger and come from just a handful of cultivars, low-bush berries are grown wild on managed land and come in several dozen varieties. They account for about 40% of the nation's total blueberry crop, and their No. 1 application is in muffins and other bakery products.
The problem, as reported by frustrated bakery processors, has been that the berries bleed into the batter, producing grayish-blue streaking that turns off most consumers. What actually happens is that skin damage due to abrasion, compression and ice-crystal formation during processing and storage leads to loss of anthocyanin pigments when blueberries are incorporated into batters.
The problem is especially acute with "rerun" berries. Those are berries that retain their stems after initial processing and must be run through de-stemming machines, which causes more abrasion than with first-run berries and allows more leakage, reports Al Bushway, a professor of food science at the university in Orono, ME.
Bakers already had tried applying powdered starch to the berries before mixing them in batter, but it didn't reduce leakage as much as they hoped. In research funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Maine Blueberry Commission, Bushway and colleagues tried guar gum, gellan gum and gum arabic before settling on the gum that best addressed the problem: carboxymethylcellulose (CMC).
The researchers coated the berries with 10%-by-weight CMC before they were mixed with muffin batter and found that the CMC coating significantly reduced anthocyanin leakage into batter during mixing. "Over the next year we'll be looking at pilot-plant and processing applications," Bushway says.
Ward developed another gum-based film, one that could not only act as a moisture barrier on skinless chicken, but could improve its appearance as well.
"The chicken could be dipped into a hot, not very concentrated slurry of this product," explains Ward. "When the gel dried, it created an intact film. You could create a transparent film or one with a texturized surface that simulated skin by letting it dry on a coarse, uneven surface. The film was not only edible, but could be formulated to be heat-reversible as well."
The same kinds of systems can be used to protect other foods from moisture loss as well. This could have applications in the fresh-cut market to help increase shelf life.
"We have also used gel technology to make reformed pickles from odd pieces and trim, portions that are not ordinarily used," says Ward. "You can form any shape you like and you also reduce the amount of scrap that you would be throwing away."
Arabic applications
Agriproducts Inc. has been developing new applications of its No. 1 product, gum arabic, as a source of soluble dietary fiber in nutraceutical drinks and as a means of enhancing flavor profiles in a broad range of other products, says Thomas A. Donaldson, president of the Clearwater, FL-based company that is a partner of Agrisales Ltd., of the United Kingdom.
The company's gum arabic systems are used to emulsify and impart smooth, creamy mouthfeel through the careful blending of its components. In addition to nutraceutical applications, where the gums suspend and emulsify particulates, these gums are used in pourable salad dressings from reduced-calorie products to "standard-of-identity" french dressings.
The gum arabic systems work best in salad dressings that are 3% to 5% oil and between 35% (the standard of identity for the product category) and 50% oil, Donaldson notes. "It imparts great 'clingability' to the products, including our systems," he says. "Manufacturers want dressing to cling to cold lettuce, not to pool in the bottom of the plate. Our products are satisfying that need without getting gummy or gloppy, maintaining smooth rheology and still imparting good cling."
Donaldson says that Agriproducts' eagerness to work with processors to develop custom applications is a main factor in the variety of new developments. "Manufacturers no longer have to settle for what's on the shelf," he says. "With the capabilities of companies like ours, they can be very cost-effective in having a product designed to meet their specific needs.
"And it's not as if the lead times on these products are long," Donaldson adds. "We can keep lead times to a minimum because we have complete knowledge of all our basic gums and how they'll interact with one another. We can normally have a prototype product on a customer's research bench within a week or so."
Back to tara
To carve its niche in the gum-ingredient market, Bunge Foods is formulating applications of a relatively new type of natural vegetable gum from tara beans. The company says it is perhaps the only volume supplier of tara bean gums in the U.S., or one of very few.
Bunge's Ingredient Systems Division is touting tara as a unique hydrocolloid with wide functionality and a lower cost than the more traditionally used locust bean gum. "Pound for pound, it's a close substitute, and in frozen products it can be used at a little bit lower usage rate than locust bean gum," says Ron Rice, a marketing manager for the Atlanta-based company. He estimates the potential lower usage at as much as 25%.
Tara is obtained from the seeds of the tara bush, which is indigenous to many tropical areas of the world, especially South America. Like guar, it is cold soluble and will attain maximum viscosity in water, milk and other low-solids systems within several minutes, Rice says. And like locust bean gum, tara tends to impart "warm eating" qualities to frozen desserts, and it imparts a pleasing "short-flow" characteristic to foods in general. It produces very high viscosities in comparison with other commonly used hydrocolloids.
The substance also exhibits excellent heat-shock protection and freeze-thaw stability, the company says, and it resists high-shear breakdown during homogenization and pumping.
Initially, Bunge will be concentrating on potential dairy applications such as stabilization of low-fat and no-fat dairy products, stabilization of cream cheese and sour cream, and water-binding and heat-shock protection in frozen desserts. "But we also think there are potential applications in lots of other areas, such as sauces, dressings, dips and meat stabilization," Rice says.
New and improved
The NutraSweet Kelco company is addressing new applications using xanthan gums. One of the applications, Hartnek explains, is a new product that is amylase-free and designed for use where starch compatibility is required. Amylase attacks starches, so it can degrade gravies or other products in which starches are used as thickening agents.
NutraSweet Kelco's new amylase-free xanthan gum product delivers excellent suspension of particulates at low concentration levels, the company says, and it can be used in combination with starches without viscosity loss in a wide variety of foods, including gravies, puddings, syrups and sauces. Another new xanthan-based product by NutraSweet Kelco is designed for use where greatest suspension and thickening are required.
Despite new products, whole new applications and even newly utilized ingredients, traditional uses of gums - such as fat-replacement applications - remain among the most popular new developments because processor and consumer demand for better fat-imitation characteristics in products continues to build.
For example, Rhone-Poulenc Inc. is in partnership with Quaker Oats Co. for development of a new brand of Oatrim for use in ice cream, skim milk and bakery products. One of the major weaknesses of such cereal-based fat substitutes has been flavor concerns; in delicately flavored products such as vanilla ice cream, cereal notes from the Oatrim have tended to emerge.
The new generation of Oatrim overcomes this challenge because it is neutral-flavored, says Mark Freeland, director of textural technologies for the Cranbury, NJ-based American arm of the French parent company. "It allows food technologists to use these products in many applications where they wouldn't be used before, such as skim milk," he says.
In addition to the work with pectins in its fruit-based flans, Hercules has been developing and marketing a new generation of pectin ingredients for a wide variety of other fat-mimetic uses with existing food categories. Its first product in this generation of pectins was an all-purpose fat mimetic that was used in bakery and dairy applications. One of Hercules' new pectins adds convenience to the mix for similar applications. The previous product had to be dissolved, and then it required the addition of a calcium salt to cross-link the polymer and create a gel matrix that then was used in low-fat or fat-free formulations. Hercules' successor product requires only the addition of water (no calcium salts necessary) and the product swells into the required gel matrix, says Sapone.
Another pectin-based new product for Hercules is an ingredient that the company developed in partnership with J.R. Simplot for use as a film barrier on a vegetable substrate which reduces fat absorption during the frying process. Yet another member of this pectin family, still in the experimental stage, is an ingredient for fat-free enrobing coatings and fillings in baked goods.
NutraSweet Kelco is pursuing fat-replacement applications of another gum type, alginates. An Australian customer has successfully used alginates to make skim milk provide the mouthful of higher-butterfat milks, but without the butterfat. After adding a "healthy" fat such as canola oil to skim milk, the company is using alginates to suspend the oil in the fluid, "giving you a nice, creamy fluid-milk type of product," says Hartnek. "Some companies in the U.S. also are looking at that technology."
NutraSweet Kelco is developing a new product whose base is a new ingredient that uses fermentation technology. The ingredient, called cellulon, is similar to cellulose gum.
"We're looking at opportunities for products that would enhance and be compatible with our other stabilizers, and cellulose gums and gels are used quite frequently in sauces, frozen dairy products, frostings, dressings and icings," says Hartnek. "This product would act exactly the same as cellulose gums at low concentrations and be compatible with our xanthan gums. This would help round out the stable of options for us."
SBI is using carrageenan-based products to address one of the classic problems of producing a cost-effective mozzarella analog: As the casein content is reduced, the shredding and melting properties of the product change dramatically.
"The biggest challenge here is coming up with a product that not only has the textural properties of cheese, but also a product that would perform throughout all the stages of further processing," says SBI's Carr. "It needs to shred and handle appropriately at different temperatures and have the right melt properties for final usage." What SBI came up with is a carrageenan-based product that allows more than 50% reduction of casein, yet results in an imitation mozzarella that can be both shredded and melted."
Dale D. Buss is an independent journalist, author and commentator based in Rochester Hills, MI. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, he has written frequently about food industry issues.
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