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Protecting Brand Integrity Through Color Precision

Inconsistent ingredient color can cost manufacturers millions in rejected batches, regulatory setbacks, and lost consumer trust. For global ingredient leader Kemin Industries, ensuring color accuracy is not just an aesthetic concern—it's central to product quality and customer satisfaction. That’s why Kemin relies on HunterLab's advanced color spectrophotometers to protect the integrity of over 500 ingredient solutions across food, pet nutrition, and more.

Operating across more than 20 countries with 15 production facilities, Kemin faces the complex task of maintaining visual uniformity in highly diverse ingredient forms. From powders and granules to liquids and pellets, their customers expect one thing: consistency. And in today's competitive baking and snack markets, even slight color deviations can signal oxidation, processing errors, or shelf-life risks.

The Challenge: Detecting Oxidative Change Before It Affects Quality

Lipid-based oxidation is a persistent challenge in the baking and snack industries. As fats and oils degrade, they visibly darken ingredient color—even before other sensory qualities change. These early shifts can result in customer dissatisfaction or failed quality checks.

For Kemin, early detection of these subtle changes is essential to delivering on their promise of quality. They needed a solution that was:

• Sensitive enough to catch imperceptible color shifts
• Scalable across facilities and ingredient types
• Easy to operate with minimal variability between users

Powders play a vital role in many industries, from food products like cocoa powder to minerals and the lifesaving medications pharmaceutical manufacturers create. Their colors must be consistent and meet customer expectations to support quality initiatives, conformance with industry standards, satisfaction, and, ultimately, profitability. Spectrophotometers provide the easiest, fastest, and most objective way to quantify color to help you reach these goals. 

Key Features to Evaluate

Learning what key features to evaluate as you explore the spectrophotometric solutions available can help you make a more sound investment.

Minimum Sample Sizes

Some ingredients, like certain high-value spices and active pharmaceutical components, are incredibly expensive. Reducing the size of the sample needed for accurate measurements is key to controlling waste and limiting sampling costs. A spectrophotometer that offers the smallest sample size possible will deliver the most value for many applications and significantly lessen the expenses involved with high-value powder production.

Sample Compatibility

Powders present unique challenges in color measurement. Many have nonuniform textures and varying particulate sizes requiring careful sample preparation to promote accurate outcomes. Their opacity demands specialized optical geometry that captures data through reflectance. A thorough, careful analysis of your powder's physical properties will help ensure the spectrophotometer's capabilities align with your needs.

Index and Scale Library

Many industries have specific industry scales or indices they use to ensure their products conform to standards. Samples may rely on different color spaces, such as the CIELAB scale often used to measure barium sulfate. Evaluate the spectrophotometers you're considering to ensure they're capable of providing data within the scales that apply to your industry.

Effective Bandwidth

Regardless of which wavelength you measure in the visible spectrum, you need to ensure the device you select has suitable effective bandwidth for accuracy. This term refers to the range of wavelengths interacting with a sample at a given moment. A narrow effective bandwidth coupled with high radiation throughput helps ensure strong signals and background noise reduction. This configuration allows for more precise readouts since the spectrophotometer can isolate smaller wavelength ranges.

Integration Capabilities

Ideally, the spectrophotometric solution you choose should fit effortlessly into existing workflows instead of forcing you to adapt proven processes. Features like universal compatibility simplify integration. This trait allows the spectrophotometer to connect to and communicate seamlessly with other devices. In addition, selecting a model with many connectivity options makes data export and transfer to your quality management systems fast and easy.

Viewing Area

While finer powders may lend themselves to a smooth, even sample surface, sample averaging is critical for measuring color in powders with larger particles and nonuniform characteristics. These traits can lead to shadowing that can create measurement discrepancies when only capturing data in one reading. Taking multiple measurements across larger viewing areas and averaging them helps resolve those challenges, so it's essential to consider viewing area size as you narrow down the options.

Apple’s distinctive boxes serve as a prime example of the importance of color in packaging. Image Source: Flickr user Brett Jordan

One of the most widespread concepts in business is the seven-second rule — people make vital decisions within the first seven seconds of encountering a product, and what happens in that time can either nurture long-term consumer loyalty or turn would-be customers off for good.

However, most consumers’ first contact isn’t with the product, but with its packaging. This element is vital to differentiating your brand and its offerings.

For example, many more people would likely recognize the signature blue of a Tiffany & Co. box than the jewelry it may contain. As such, packaging design is often just as important as the product design, shaping consumer perception from the first touch point. With more products than ever competing for space in the marketplace, smart packaging design choices can be the deciding factor in product success, and spectrophotometric analysis helps ensure that your vision becomes reality.

Harnessing the Power of Color in Packaging

Packaging color choice isn’t arbitrary, and it goes beyond simply selecting an aesthetically pleasing color. Instead, designers must draw on both deeply ingrained color psychology and a preexisting visual lexicon of product associations to create packaging that speaks to the consumer in a language they understand.

Brands use colors to project a specific message. For instance, soft drink brands typically use blue for low-sugar options, green for lemon-lime flavors, and red for cola. Similarly, consumers associate green with pine scent in household cleaners and yellow with citrusy aromas in dishwashing detergent. Packaging also shapes consumer choices in prescription drugs, where it can influence perceptions of quality and performance.

Yet, it's essential to remember how these conceptions can shift over time. The sleek, minimalist, white packaging of Apple products is one that brands often shunned before because it was associated with store-brand or “generic” offerings. It's therefore possible to redefine these perceptions while simultaneously becoming defined by specific color choices.

Enter Standard Data window

FAQ: “Do you have a formula to calculate Hunter L, a, b values from CIE L*, a*, b* values?”

The only way to convert between different color scales, illuminants, and observers is to have spectral data for your  samples.

All Hunter L, a, b and CIE L*, a*, b* values are calculated from X, Y, Z values and chromaticity coefficients for the illuminant and observer used. Most color scales are calculated using CIE X, Y, Z tristimulus values. Spectral values from the sample measurement allow for conversion between different color scales, illuminants, and observers because X, Y, Z CIE tristimulus values are calculated from spectral values.

That being said, the HunterLab EasyMatch QC software does have the ability to convert color values assuming you are using the same illuminant and observer. To do this you will first need to enter the color values you want to convert into the EasyMatch QC software. This is done by right clicking in the Job Tree and selecting Enter Standard (or Sample) Data. Select the appropriate color Scale and Illuminant/Observer combination, enter your data, and click OK. Once you enter the Standard (or Sample) ID the values will appear in the Color Data Table.

To convert these values move the mouse to the Color Data Table, right click, and select Configure. Use the drop down menu under Scales to select the color scale you would like to convert to and use the left arrows to move it to the Selected Items list. Click OK to save your changes.

In the Color Data Table you should now see your converted color values.

Color quality and consistency are vital for potato chips, impacting their appeal to consumers in a competitive market. The visual color standards reference chart for potato chips was developed to improve color accuracy by illustrating chips ranging from light to dark. However, visual color analyses are often inaccurate due to their subjectivity. Luckily, you can achieve precise color measurements with spectrophotometers.

Flaws of Color Reference Charts for Potato Chips

The potato chip color reference chart is fully based on visual perception, which varies drastically from person to person due to:

Observer sensitivity: Color appears differently to each person based on their natural eye sensitivity. As a result, some people see colors more vividly than others.

Lighting: Objects can look different under various light sources, which greatly impact color.

Age: Human color perception fades with age, meaning someone in their 20s will likely see a potato chip differently than someone in their 70s.

Retinal fatigue: The longer a person focuses on an object, the more their eyes strain, resulting in incorrect color perception.

Object background: An object's background can impact how we view the sample due to the contrast between them.

Color memory: Our brains use our previous experiences and expectations to identify colors, which often hinders our ability to see them correctly. For example, someone may identify an orange banana as yellow because they expect bananas to be yellow.

The color of mortar contributes to the aesthetic of any brick structure. Image Credit: Unsplash user Francesco Mazzoli

It’s the same old story. Brick gets all the press, but it’s really the mortar that’s holding everything together. Which means that, for architects, contractors, homeowners, and mortar manufacturers, the color of mortar is every bit as important to the overall aesthetic of a structure as the color of brick. While few may notice or comment on a mortar color that perfectly complements the hue of a building’s brick, incorrectly colored mortar can become glaringly obvious to even the casual observer. For this reason, contractors pay close attention to the mortar color specified by architects and desired by homeowners. Manufacturers, therefore, must closely monitor their products to ensure they continually produce the mortar colors they advertise. This is especially true for manufacturers who fill special color orders from architects, mixing to the preference of their customers.

Architects choose mortar to match the color of their materials. Image Credit: Unsplash User Mike Tinnion

Large-scale pharmaceutical companies benefit from using Hitch Standardization because these calculations help ensure product color consistency across multiple lab locations. Image Source: Shutterstock user Intarapong

If you’ve ever purchased your favorite brand of over-the-counter medication while you’re on vacation, you know that brand-name pills, powders, and liquids often look exactly the same no matter where you are in the world. Even when you travel thousands of miles away, your preferred brand of allergy tablets will likely be the same reliable shade of bright orange, whether you’re buying the tablets in London or New York. In order to supply medications to these many different cities, large-scale pharmaceutical companies typically operate hundreds of manufacturing facilities around the world.  

But with so many different manufacturing facilities, how do pharmaceutical companies maintain precise color consistency in their products? They accomplish this by standardizing their manufacturing and testing process. More specifically, large-scale companies use methods like Hitch Standardization to ensure that all of their manufacturing facilities perform color quality control tests in precisely the same way. By standardizing the color quality control process across different manufacturing locations using Hitch Standardization, you can produce medications that are perfectly consistent in color.

How Color Consistency Benefits the Pharmaceutical Industry and Consumers

Color quality control is a vital aspect of the pharmaceutical industry. Not only can consistent color be a sign of proper formulation and a significant safety mechanism, it also deeply impacts consumer perception of medication. Additionally, manufacturers of brand name medications rely on color consistency to help them gain a greater share of the market and establish their brand identity in the eyes of their customers. For these manufacturers, the product’s unique trade dress (the appearance of the product) could significantly increase a customer’s loyalty and trust in the brand.1

And color consistency isn’t just important for over-the-counter medication manufacturers; pharmaceutical companies that produce prescription drugs also have to ensure that their products are consistent in color, in part due to the effect color has on both patient behavior, including adherence. For example, studies have shown that people are more likely to take their prescribed medications as prescribed when they see that their pills are the same color every time they refill their prescriptions at the pharmacy.2 If the pill color suddenly changes, then people are less likely to take them as prescribed. As such, color consistency isn’t merely a marketing tool—it can have a very real impact on patient health and wellbeing.

Large-Scale Manufacturers Often Struggle with Color Consistency

Although color consistency is critical in the pharmaceutical industry, it can be very difficult to achieve, especially for large-scale companies. Many large pharmaceutical companies manage hundreds of different test labs and manufacturing facilities around the world. For example, Johnson & Johnson oversees a network of 120 separate manufacturing facilities in more than 60 different countries.3 With so many manufacturing and testing facilities operating simultaneously, it can be challenging to identify and enforce consistent sample measurement standards. This is why many pharmaceutical companies use Hitch Standardization to ensure that every product they create is being measured in exactly the same way.

You can gain better color quality control over your pharmaceutical products when you test these products using a standard, well-defined method. Image Source: Shutterstock user showcake