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The true key to business longevity lies in your products. What you offer has to work as expected — more than that, it has to be safe, functional, and fit any standards you and other governing bodies have set forth. Ensuring that requires testing and more testing, and that's what performance qualification is all about.

What Is Performance Qualification?

The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) defines performance qualification (PQ) as establishing confidence in your finished product or process by testing it before release. This testing should determine whether:

• The product meets functionality and safety requirements.
• Any results can be easily reproduced.

For example, HunterLab's MiniScan EZ 4500 portable spectrometer can identify color using some of the most common color scales and indices. We promise this capability in the product's description. Before we could release that information, we had to complete performance qualification.

To do so, we tested hundreds of color samples to ensure that our spectrometer got the answer right every time. When it didn't, we adjusted our product and tested it again and again until it was as accurate as possible. By the time the product hit the market, we were sure it was ready for wide release.

Research shows that color is one of the most significant variables affecting customers’ choice of virtually all consumer goods, from the foods we eat to the clothes we wear to the medications we take. Colors are vital to guiding consumer choices — selecting the right combination of hues can be crucial to a product’s success.

As such, understanding how color theory works is essential to your ability to fully harness the potential of color. With appealing color harmonies, you can attract customers, enhance their experiences, and shape customer relationships with your product.

What Is Color Harmony?

Color harmony is the concept in color theory that uses geometric relationships to identify harmonious color combinations. These combinations are found on the color wheel, which places primary, secondary, and tertiary colors in rainbow order.

You can find color harmony by placing geometric shapes on the wheel. Choose your key color — the color in your design you cannot change or want to draw attention to — and locate the different color harmony types on the color wheel to identify the combinations most pleasing to the eye.

Once you have found harmonious colors, you can adjust their saturation, tone, tint, and shade. These factors make colors brighter, darker, or lighter, letting you achieve more hues beyond the standard 12 on the color wheel. Changing these aspects of your colors can give your color scheme the right look or mood for your project.

How Understanding Color Harmony Can Help Enhance Consumer Perception and Experience

Color goes beyond visual appeal — it can affect a person's perceptions and behaviors. Color psychology studies how colors affect human behavior, especially for branding. Your color choices will impact your customers' impression of your brand, including whether they purchase from you.

Colors enhance consumer perception and experience through:

• Brand recognition: Your colors speak to your brand's personality, so choose colors that speak to the brand image you want to portray. Use the same colors across all your branded materials to make your brand recognizable.
• Product differentiation: Colors help you stand out from your competitors or differentiate between product types.
• Associations: Every color is associated with a mood or concept. Use these connections to your advantage to anchor your products to a specific feeling.

Examples of Color Harmony

Color harmony allows you to find visually pleasing combinations. The most common color harmonies include:

Direct harmony can be used to make a visual splash, but it’s important to make sure the effect isn’t too intense. For a softer look, choose split complementary colors. Image Source: Flickr user Linda Hartley

Color is a critical quality component for spices like paprika. The American Spice Trade Association (ASTA) has sampling and measurement standards for paprika, and a spectrophotometer from HunterLab effectively quantifies paprika color values for quality assurance.

How Paprika and Oleoresin Spices Are Made

Paprika is obtained from the ripened, ground, and dried fruit pods of the Capsicum annuum species. The Capsicum annuum peppers used for paprika are sweet and mild with little to no capsaicin, which is a heat compound.

The Capsicum annuum plant is grown until its peppers are mature and have ripened to a red color. The fully ripened peppers are picked for paprika to give the spice its signature red color. The pepper seeds are removed, and the fruit pods are dried and ground.

Oleoresin paprika — or paprika extract — is the oil-soluble extract obtained by extracting lipids and pigments from Capsicum annuum linn or Capsicum frutescens fruits. The oleoresin comprises capsaicin, capsanthin, and capsorubin, giving the product a strong taste and odor. Oleoresin paprika is a natural dye that colors foods a deep red hue.

Many industries use color additives to achieve certain effects, like making a product appealing, attractive, or appetizing. Color additives also help consumers identify information like flavors or dosages.

The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates the use of color additives, as many mixtures and chemicals used in these substances can be hazardous when interacted with or ingested. Understanding FDA color additive regulations is essential to safely and appropriately use them in your products.

Why Does the FDA Regulate Colors?

FDA color additive regulation is essential to ensure the safe and appropriate use of color additives. Without regulations, harmful additives could be used, resulting in harmful health effects. As a business, you must pay attention to FDA food color regulations because your products can be reviewed and cause the FDA to take enforcement action against your product and business.

Colors have long been added to cosmetics, drugs, and food. Traditionally, color additives came from natural mineral and vegetable sources. In the mid-1800s, synthetic dyes were discovered and created with coal by-products. By the 1900s, many products were artificially colored, and numerous coloring agents were found to be toxins, carcinogens, irritants, and more. Additionally, artificial colors were often used to hide damage or imperfections in food products.

This led Congress to pass the Food and Drugs Act in 1906, prohibiting poisonous color additives in food products and concealing food inferiorities. In 1927, the recently-established FDA became responsible for enforcing it. Over the next several years, the FDA recognized the need for stricter regulation over color additives in food and drug products. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 did just that, including medical and cosmetic device regulations.

In 1960, the FDA released amendments to the color additive regulations after continued health issues related to food additives. The amendments clearly defined “color additive” and indicated that color additives could only be used if listed as “suitable and safe” for specific uses. Since then, the FDA has been removing additives from the list — only about half remain today.

Understanding FDA Food Regulations

Food color additives must be FDA approved before they can be used in food products. The approval process involves scientifically evaluating the color additive to ensure its safety.

After approving a color additive, the FDA continually monitors its use to ensure it remains safe. Regulations change if an additive is deemed unsafe to use at any point. The FDA updates its Final Rules for food color additives based on petitions filed, which you can check anytime.

When using color additives in food, maintaining compliance is essential. There are many aspects of FDA food color regulations to keep in mind to help ensure you're following regulations. While you should check for specifics, here are several regulations you need to follow:

• Only use additives with an approved status on the FDA's list.
• Include the proper information on your food dye label per general labeling requirements.
• Only use approved or safe levels of color additives.
• List all food ingredients, including color additives, on the label.

Failure to comply with FDA food color regulations creates health risks for consumers and can result in various repercussions from the FDA. For example, you may incur fines, you may receive a warning letter, or your products could be removed from commerce. Understanding and measuring color additives can help ensure you stay compliant.

Spectrophotometers use light absorption data to determine the quality of fresh tomato products and help identify ripening disorders. Image Source: Flickr user U.S. Department of Agriculture (CC BY 2.0)

People with kids would probably agree that ketchup is the secret ingredient to improving the diets of young children. With it, you can convince almost any picky toddler to try new foods. But this love isn’t limited to the juvenile palate—just look at diners, restaurants, and fast food establishments across the country. From specially formulated bottled products to mass produced foil-lined packets, ketchup has embedded itself in American cuisine.

But with high demand for the condiment comes a volume of production that requires rigorous quality control. The competitive nature of the market has made it imperative for manufacturers to choose the best color monitoring systems to ensure that their fresh tomatoes translate into high-quality ketchup products. With advanced spectrophotometry and tomato color classification image analysis, you can develop a highly efficient system for condiment production, ensuring both quality and consistency.

Using Color Analysis to Determine the Quality of Fresh Tomatoes

Because color is a sign of quality in fresh fruits and vegetables as well as in the foods that are processed from these ingredients, the final color outcome of any tomato ketchup is, of course, directly related to the color quality of your fresh tomato product, with “color and color uniformity contribut[ing] directly to quality and marketability”1.  Measuring the color uniformity of fresh tomatoes can also be used to identify ripening disorders such as YSD (yellow shoulder disorder)2 that can degrade the quality of tomato ingredients.

Tomato color classification image analysis simplifies the color grading process by providing quantifiable data that identifies both high and low-quality products which are otherwise undetectable to the human eye. With advanced spectral technology, light absorption values can measure the lycopene and beta-carotene contents of your product to detect major tissue quality issues and reduce the number of YSD tomatoes in production batches.

Tomato paste and tomato sauce have different textures, flavors, and uses in culinary dishes. Tomato paste is a concentrated paste made from cooked, strained, and pureed tomatoes. Tomato sauce is a thin product made from pureed, simmered, and seasoned tomatoes.

Customers have specific color and appearance expectations for paste and sauce. Tomato product manufacturers must understand these perceptions and use effective color measurement and management solutions to create products that match expectations.

Tomato soup is a popular comfort food, and organic varieties combine wholesome nostalgia with healthy benefits. Organic tomato soup manufacturers use color management standards to produce soups that meet customers' expectations and keep them coming back for more.

Benefits of Organic Food

Organic foods offer several potential benefits, including:

• More nutrients: Organic food may have minor to moderate nutrient increases like antioxidants and flavonoids.
• Less pesticide residue: Organic food often has lower levels of pesticide residue due to the types of pesticides used in organic farming and the lack of airborne pesticides from conventional farms.
• Reduced metals: Organic food may have lower levels of cadmium — a metal that can be toxic in high concentrations — compared to food grown using conventional methods since organic farming does not use synthetic fertilizers.
• Lower bacteria amounts: Organic food often has lower levels of the dangerous types of bacteria than food produced through conventional methods.