Handling Flavors & Fragrance Ingredients
Luke Grocholl, Head of Food Regulatory Experts, Jamie Gleason, Head of Flavors & Fragrance
Merck
Introducing Hard-to-Handle Ingredients
Flavors and Fragrances (F&F) ingredients are universal in the modern food and beverage industry. Careful scientific analysis, dedicated testing, and sometimes sheer luck have identified and produced thousands of ingredients to enhance our taste and smell experiences. While commonly used at parts per million (ppm) levels in finished formulations and even lower levels in finished consumer goods, in their pure concentrated forms, some ingredients may be difficult to handle, store, and transport. A portion of these commonly used chemicals present corrosive or oxidation hazards or can react dangerously with other materials.
While these ingredients may be essential to the end-product’s formulation, difficulty in handling introduces supply chain risks for packaging, storage, and transport. These risks must be carefully managed to maintain the safety of personnel, product integrity, and customer expectations.
Suppliers with a collaborative team of packaging engineers, regulatory experts, quality specialists, and operations personnel are best equipped to provide solutions for hard-to-handle materials. This paper provides examples of hard-to-handle materials and a look into the role of a packaging engineer.
Acetaldehyde & Other Challenging Ingredients
Naturally occurring in foods such as ripe fruit, coffee, and bread, acetaldehyde is a common flavor ingredient in fruit beverages and other fruit flavors, enhancing the formulations’ freshness. In its pure form, acetaldehyde is highly volatile, which can lead to dangerous pressure buildup, especially when exposed to elevated temperatures. This pressure can cause storage containers to distort or rupture, creating potential hazardous situations for individuals attempting to handle the container of material. In addition to its volatility, when exposed to heat, the acetal¬dehyde decomposition process yields paraldehyde which oxidizes in air, discolors the product, and results in off-notes of vinegar.
In addition to acetaldehyde, there are several other commonly used ingredients, like dimethyl sulfide, that pose not only chemical shipping hazard challenges but also stench issues that can disrupt the transportation and delivery of these products. These challenges can be mitigated through collaboration with dedicated experts who determine the best packaging options to safely ship materials without risk or flavor compromise. Packaging engineers develop solutions for shipping hard-to-handle materials across the street or around the world.
Experts on Packaging
Packaging engineers, sometimes called packaging scientists, are specialized engineers. To confidently work with F&F ingredients, a strong background in chemistry is often required. This experience provides invaluable insight into the chemical and physical properties of ingredients and the best methods for handling and packaging to ensure they arrive safely with product integrity intact. Packaging engineers must be familiar with the compatibility of different compounds and pay close attention to ingredient and packaging component interactions to avoid unwanted reactions.
Packaging engineers draw on their chemical knowledge to determine the required components for the best packaging to meet the customer’s needs. They work closely with regulatory and compliance managers, who complement the packaging engineer’s product knowledge with a comprehensive understanding of the global regulatory standards for each ingredient. Depending on where the product is sourced and its end destination, there may be different regulations to consider.
Packaging Engineers Offer Support
Packaging engineers use a set of guidelines based on each material’s physical properties to assist in the selection of its ideal packaging configuration for the intended mode of transportation.
There are numerous factors packaging engineers take into consideration:
- Scale: The amount of ingredient in each unit. The packaging that works for 50 grams may not be ideal for 25 kilograms.
- Physical properties: How dense is the material? What is the vapor pressure?
- Chemical properties: Does it have a stench? Is it light-sensitive? Is it a lachrymator, corrosive, or otherwise hazardous? Does it interact with any materials that are commonly used in packaging?
- End use (e.g. food or cosmetic): Is the packaging aligned with the end-use requirements? (For example, glass may be acceptable in an R&D lab but not in a manufacturing environment).
- Shelf life: Will the packaging and shipping conditions adversely impact the product’s long-term stability?
These aspects are the determining factors for the type of packaging to be used. Some packaging options include a bottle and cap, a drum, or a bag-in-box; choosing the right one for each circumstance comes down to the input of an informed packaging engineer and their team.
Packaging Component Selection and Testing
In some cases, customers have specific packaging design requirements for products to fit their processing lines or to meet industry-specific regulatory requirements. For example, although glass is extremely compatible with most ingredients, customers in the food sector sometimes request plastic or metal containers to reduce the risk of broken glass in their processing facilities.
Metal packaging might be the go-to solution if there are issues such as chemical or physical reactions with plastic that lead to decomposition, discoloration, or contamination. Odors diffusing through plastic may be another reason to consider metal containers. An overpack, such as a box, can, or carton around a bottle, is sometimes appropriate to mitigate or protect against glass breakage concerns. Metal is not always the best solution for primary containers; if the material is chemically reactive, the overpack or secondary container solution may have to be applied.
Once the best solution has been identified, the integrity of packaging configuration must be tested. Generally, the final design will be subjected to a drop test, where the package is dropped from a height of at least six feet in five different directions: top, bottom, both sides, and onto the corner. After the drop test, the overall package is then inspected for overpack integrity failures and product container leakages.
Once a package design is validated for transportation safety, it will be used to ship the product to the customer. In the event that any issues are identified in the final testing phases, it will be sent back to the packaging engineer for re-evaluation.
Other Considerations
Customers are driven towards environmentally friendly packaging more than ever before. In the past, large containers would generally be plastic drums or metal drums with a liner. Now, there is a push towards industrial-strength, lined, corrugated cardboard boxes that are more readily recyclable. Custom packaging also allows specific quantities to be ordered, decreasing the amount of waste and further enhancing environmental sustainability.
Global shipping regulations, particularly airfreight or overseas transportation, add an additional level of security, with more stringent tests and regulations than are required for road transport. With many chemicals now being sourced from Asia, shipping processes are garnering more attention than ever.
A supplier must be able to pack products to meet customer requests and comply with the form of freight transport being used, be it road, sea, or air. If a sensitive flavor ingredient starts to decompose above 40°C, packaging that protects it from temperature extremes while sitting on a hot runway or in a container on an ocean freighter is critical. Similarly, if dropping below the freezing point will harm a product, it must also be protected.
Support
A good supplier will know all the properties of their ingredients and be able to pinpoint requirements quickly for new products, particularly those that are hard to handle.
As an experienced and trusted global supplier, we are well versed in hard-to-handle ingredient requirements for packaging and compliant transportation. Our goal is for them to reach their destination in prime condition. With access to over 100 food-grade packaging configurations and endless solutions to meet customer-specific needs, our product management and collaborative support teams expertly prepare products for safe delivery. A consultative approach to each situation offers further peace of mind to customers.
We leverage over 50+ years of experience supplying over 300,000+ products with industry-leading supply chain security. In-house packaging facilities allow for clear risk mitigation strategies to be implemented throughout the supply chain.
Hard to Handle Products Uniquely Packaged for Delivery |
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