Best Practices for Measuring the Color of Beverages

Measuring the color of your beverages is essential for consumer appeal and product quality standards. Ensure you remain compliant by using the highest-quality spectrophotometers to measure the color of your stock.

Different Factors Can Influence the Base Color of Beverages

How you produce and store your products can impact the base color of your drinks. Differences in temperature during production or storage are major players that can change your beverage composition. Adding natural ingredients to your beverages also plays a deciding role. Because natural ingredients are volatile, these can change the color consistency of your drinks.

Diverse Liquid Characteristics Impact Methods of Measurement

As liquids are so diverse, you'll need different methods to measure their colors. Not all color measurement tools can identify all beverage types, but spectrophotometers are excellent for measuring multiple beverage types in one solution:

• Opaque beverages: Opaque beverages include drinks such as tomato juice and pulp-rich juices. Light cannot penetrate these liquids easily, so use a reflectance spectrophotometer to measure opaque drinks.
• Translucent / Transparent liquids: These liquids can range from entirely transparent to slightly translucent. These are drinks like bottled water, grape juice, and herbal teas. Measure these beverages using transmittance spectrophotometry.

Staying Consistent With Color Throughout the Production Phase Ensures Quality

Lower your costs and maintain quality by identifying any color inconsistencies early on. An efficient color-measuring system can help you spot color differences and prevent remanufacturing. If you don't spot inconsistencies and these beverages are placed on store shelves, consumers may notice the color discrepancies. When consumers recognize such product changes, they may decide not to buy, impacting your bottom line.

Maintaining Beverage Industry Standards When Measuring Color

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and various food and beverage regulatory bodies provide guidelines on the health and safety of beverages in general and beverage color in particular. Several rules outline how you can use color in food and beverages and how much food coloring you can add. You can only maintain standards when you use an accurate system to measure the color of your beverages.

Measure the Color of Your Beverages With the HunterLab Difference

These are just a few of the best practices you should know about for measuring the color of beverages. For more information, get in touch with HunterLab today. We provide you with the best spectrophotometers to reliably measure the color of your beverages, whether you're working with opaque or translucent liquids.

Explore our offerings to find the ideal solution, or contact us through our online form for any further questions you may have.