User:ELCcomms/Specialty food ingredients

Specialty food ingredients typically preserve, texture, emulsify, colour, help processing and in some cases add an extra health dimension to produced food. These ingredients are essential in providing today’s consumer with a wide range of processed foods. They range from micro-ingredients like vitamins, minerals and enzymes to macro-ingredients like specific proteins, fats, carbohydrates, fibres and other substances. With their technological, nutritional and health related functions they make food tasty, pleasant to eat, safe, healthy and affordable.

Types of specialty food ingredients
Specialty food ingredients cover a wide range of products, such as:
 * Acidifiers
 * Antioxidants
 * Colours
 * Cultures
 * Emulsifiers
 * Enzymes
 * Fibres
 * Flavour enhancers
 * Flavourings
 * Gelling agents
 * Minerals
 * Preservatives
 * Stabilisers
 * Sweeteners
 * Thickeners
 * Vitamins
 * Yeast and yeast products
 * And other functional ingredients such as omega-3 fatty acids, polyphenols, proteins, etc.

Why use specialty food ingredients?
Specialty food ingredients are an essential in many of the food products we take for granted – including the convenience foods that form a staple basis of the busy modern lifestyle. Specialty food ingredients may be used in order to (non-exhaustive list): Aid the manufacturing process of a food product, its packaging or transport and improve the shelf life.
 * Improve a food’s keeping properties, for example by preventing mould from growing and slowing down the chemical reactions that make foods go off.
 * Maintain or improve a product’s sensory properties, such as texture, consistency, taste and colour.
 * Maintain a food’s nutritional quality, for example by preventing vitamins, essential amino acids and unsaturated fats from degrading.
 * Provide products for consumers who have specific nutritional requirements: gluten-free alternatives for coeliac disease sufferers, sugar substitutes for diabetics, foods reduced in fat, etc.
 * Enrich the foodstuffs in fibres, minerals, vitamins and unsaturated fatty acids.

A stringent EU legislative framework
Specialty food ingredients, like all food ingredients, are subject to Regulation 178/2002, also known as the ‘General Food Law Regulation’, which provides the legal basis to the food safety policy of the EU, along with a “farm to fork" approach.

In addition, specialty food ingredients are subject to a number of specific pieces of legislation, including (though not exhaustively):
 * The package on Food Improvement Agents, adopted in December 2008 and composed of four Regulations aiming to create an EU framework for food enzymes and harmonize the authorisation procedure for food additives, food enzymes and food flavourings, namely :Regulation (EC) 1331/2008 establishing a common authorisation procedure for food additives, food enzymes and food flavourings; Regulation (EC) 1332/2008 on food enzymes;	Regulation (EC) 1333/2008 on food additives; and Regulation (EC) 1334/2008 on flavourings;
 * Regulation (EC) 258/97 on novel foods (presently being amended);
 * Regulation (EC) 1924/2006 on nutrition and health claims made on foods;
 * Regulation (EC) 1925/2006 on addition of vitamins and minerals and of certain other substances to foods;
 * Directive 2002/46/EC on food supplements;
 * Directive 2000/13 on the labelling, presentation and advertising of foodstuffs (presently being amended).

Safety evaluation at EU level
Before any new ingredient is used in food, it must undergo a risk analysis and show to be safe at its proposed levels of use.

In addition to this and for some categories of specialty food ingredients (e.g. food additives), it must also be demonstrated that there is a real technological need – if this need cannot be established, then the substance will not be authorised for use in the European Union.

The European Commission is responsible for authorising a number of food ingredients (additives, enzymes, flavourings as well as novel foods) before they are placed on the European market via a Common Authorisation Procedure. The Commission’s authorisation is based on the scientific opinion of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), whose role is to assess and communicate on all risks associated with the food chain. The EFSA safety evaluations are carried out within EFSA by scientific panels composed of independent scientific experts with recognised experience in the field of food safety.

EFSA cooperates with the member states food safety agencies and also takes into account opinions from other international bodies, for example JEFCA – the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives. This group of international experts is sponsored jointly by the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN and the World Health Organisation.

EFSA uses world-class standards for evaluating the safety of foods. The evaluation strategies are described in publicly available guidance documents, and may involve e.g. exposure assessments, toxicological studies incl. oral feeding studies on rodents and mutagenicity studies. The result of such safety evaluations will be a public opinion in which EFSA states in which conditions and at which levels (if appropriate) a substance may be used in food.