Top 5 Things to Know About Measuring the Color of Seasonings

Color consistency in seasonings is crucial to your product's success with consumers, and chromatic data lets you know your goods fall within allowable tolerances. Exploring the top five things to know about measuring the color of seasonings enables you to achieve consistency and improve product quality.

1. Understand How Color Influences Your Customers' Buying Decisions

Seasonings bring products to life with a unique flavor that your consumers crave, but visual inspection is the first experience these customers have with your goods. Color becomes an important indicator in consumers' choices since they equate it with flavor, quality, and desirability. No matter how tasty your seasoning is, customers will pass on your products if they don't meet color expectations. 

2. Choose the Right Measurement Method for Their Physical Traits

Seasonings present unique measurement challenges due to their physical properties — they often feature components with different sizes, shapes, or textures. For example, everything bagel seasoning has small, round poppy seeds combined with larger, flatter sesame seeds and flakes of sea salt, minced onion, and dried garlic. These nonuniform traits require reflectance measurements to quantify color accurately.

3. Follow Applicable Industry Standards

Industry standards may apply to some of the components included in your seasoning. For example, the American Spice Trade Association institutes guidelines for the color of paprika. If this spice is a prevalent ingredient in your seasoning, its color must conform to those tolerances before you include it in your blend.

4. Measure Frequently

As goods move through production processes, they're often exposed to environmental changes. Factors like moisture fluctuations and exposure to heat can alter colors. Data collection at every production stage helps mitigate the risk of product waste by enabling faster identification of where color alterations arise.

5. Implement the Best Seasoning Measurement Solution

Manufacturers need tools capable of delivering highly accurate color and spectral data to ensure their seasonings' color quality and consistency. Spectrophotometers are ideal for meeting these needs.

The ColorFlex L2 from HunterLab is a full-featured spectrophotometer built to measure opaque samples like seasonings. Thanks to its intuitive operation and simplified onboard training, users can start collecting data in minutes. Upgraded Essentials 2.0 software further betters the user experience, enabling your quality assurance team to see details on tristimulus and spectral data sets quickly and easily.

This equipment promotes more confidence in data integrity, with a precision camera featuring guides that help users correctly position samples. Leverage high-resolution images for real-time quality decision-making that supports efficiency and reduces product waste. Data and image sharing are also quick and seamless with a suite of connectivity ports.

Additionally, the ColorFlex L2 offers autonomy as an independent color workstation — users need no extra PC or laptop to execute software and evaluate results.

Trust HunterLab for Spectrophotometric Color Measurement Solutions

HunterLab has been a trusted partner to those in the food manufacturing industry for over 70 years. Our innovative and sophisticated spectrophotometers help processors boost consumers' perceptions and meet industry standards with exceptional accuracy and consistency. Contact our color measurement experts for a quote on the ColorFlex L2 or more information on our other solutions.