Let’s not fool ourselves: food additives don’t have a good reputation. This perception may be the result of years of abusing the use of additives, but it is also due to a lack of information and misrepresentation of their nature, dosing, and state of development and technological innovation.
However, we mustn’t forget that, without them, it would be impossible to access many of the food products that we enjoy on a daily basis. Functional ingredients ensure our diets are easier to manage, more varied, and increasingly more natural. Our current reality shows a trend towards consuming more local food products, and the belief that additives aren’t necessary for their safe and healthy consumption, but do people think that hake from the Cantabrian sea, Galician octopus or wild Alaskan salmon are caught in the Mediterranean?
The key to accepting additives as an essential and healthy component in human diets lies in their technological development, investing in research into new formulations that are increasingly more natural, and by customising solutions to each specific case.
We have to accept that an octopus is not a cuttlefish, nor sea bass a lobster, and each of these products requires a different type of treatment to reach the end customer in optimal conditions for consumption. Different products present different needs, meaning solutions cannot be standardised.
Processors of seafood, pre-cooked products, and even the meat industry, are required to improve the quality, appearance and texture of their products by using natural and healthy food ingredients, all without reducing their production performance.
In this case, the main producing countries at a global level are located in various regions of Asia, Africa and Central America. The treatments must be applied prior to the freezing process and transport to target markets to ensure they are truly effective.
For PH7, the integration into the Barcelonesa Foodtech division enables it to provide proprietary formulations and European technology that can be developed and applied at the source, with all the benefits this entails, thereby transforming the company into a true expert in seafood-specific food additives.
Thanks to the technological development of functional ingredients, the outdated perception of these ingredients as unhealthy and potentially harmful is now far in the past with a new reality in sight: all it takes is choosing the right supplier that is capable of providing custom, natural, and healthy formulations.
