Food additives

The idea of using of food additives is improvement of food taste and it appearance, increase the stabiliy of the food and facilitate the technological process.

The current regulation defines additives as any substance which, regardless of its nutritional value, is not used as food, nor is it a characteristic ingredient of food, but is added to food during technological production, processing, preparation, processing, packaging, transport or storage, so that directly or indirectly through its intermediates it becomes or may become a food ingredient.

A food additive may be authorized only if it meets the following conditions:

• it does not, on the basis of the scientific evidence available, pose a safety concern to the health of the consumer at the level of use proposed;
• there is a reasonable technological need that cannot be achieved by other economically and technologically practicable means;
• its use does not mislead the consumer.

By using appropriate methodologies for determining the amounts of additives present, it has become necessary to check compliance with the permitted levels. For this purpose, various techniques are used – HPLC-PDA, volumetric, volumetric / spectrophotometric.