Table Beets at Root of Madison Company's Success (Oct 15, 2002)
Madeline Fisher
Joachim von Elbe recalls a day in the late 1970's, when while touring a Wisconsin beet cannery he was struck by a bright red, downright juicy idea.
Table beets were big business in the state, and von Elbe, a UW-Madison professor of food science keenly interested in food color, had been called in to help solve quality problems related to the final, in-the-can color of the plant's processed beets.
But it was the processing itself that caught his eye. As he watched rivers of scarlet juice running everywhere from the slicing of beets, he says, "My first reaction was, 'My God, this is red! Maybe we ought to use the effluent, the waste stream, of the beets for its pigment.'"
Artificial food dye Red #2 had been recently banned and interest in natural food colors was growing. So, with the cannery's owner, David Lau, and university plant breeder, Buck (Warren) Gabelman, von Elbe soon embarked on an effort to develop the pigments in beet juice, called betalains, into a natural red dye for the food colorant industry.
Twenty years later, the collaboration has definitely borne fruit...er, roots. In his retirement from the university, von Elbe now runs Phytocolorants, a Madison-based company that markets the only U.S. beet variety bred and grown solely for its pigment.
The company owes its existence both to von Elbe's research demonstrating the stability of betalains in foods, and the support of Lau - who took a special interest in processing beets for their color - and his Clyman, Wis. operation, Aunt Nellie's Foods.
But at the root of Phytocolorants success is the variety it markets - a beet so deeply pigmented that instead of bright-red, it appears jet-black inside.
Known by the unadorned moniker, "high pigment beet," the variety came to be after the canning waste that originally captured von Elbe's attention quickly proved too dilute as a pigment source. As an alternative, Aunt Nellie's had begun squashing the roots of regular canning beets and concentrating their juice for pigment, when the thought dawned, von Elbe says, "Why aren't we looking for a greater pigment concentration in the beets?"
Thus, in 1978, his colleague Gabelman (now emeritus) launched a UW-Madison table beet breeding program aimed at selecting beets not for their roundness or size or taste, but for the first time - their color.
"We were no longer talking about how many tons of beets per acre," von Elbe says, "but how much pigment we could get per acre."
Although smaller amounts of betalains are needed to color foods than artificial dyes, red pigments also compose less than one percent of beet juice, making them about 10 times more expensive. "The idea behind the breeding program is if you can develop a beet that is very high in color, you can make it more cost-efficient to extract the pigment," explains horticulture professor Irwin Goldman, inheritor of Gabelman's program and co-founder of Phytocolorants.
To give beets a darker hue, Gabelman employed a classical breeding technique called recurrent selection, in which the reddest members of a beet family were selected and interbred. Offspring sporting the deepest color were then interbred again, and the process repeated down through the generations.
After more than 14 cycles and 20 years of breeding by Gabelman and Goldman, the high pigment beet now contains about five times the pigment of a standard beet from the grocery store. "It's just incredibly dark," says Goldman. "It appears black because the eye can only handle so much red color."
Phytocolorant's high pigment beet after one cycle of breeding for greater color (top beet), versus after eight breeding cycles (bottom beet). The beet has now been taken through over 14 breeding cycles. Photo courtesy of Irwin Goldman.
The scientists brought their beet to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) in 1995; a patent on the variety issued earlier this year. WARF licenses the beet to Phytocolorants, which in turn sublicenses it exclusively to Seneca Foods Corp., now the owner of Lau's original Aunt Nellie's cannery.
And so, from the same operation in Clyman where it all began, Seneca today cultivates the high pigment beet and extracts and concentrates its juice for customers in the food colorant industry. Virtually all the royalties Phytocolorants earns on sales of the high pigment beet are donated by the company to support natural colors research at the UW-Madison.
Over the years, the beet has lent its color to many foods, including Jell-O, ice cream, fruit juices, powdered drink mixes, yogurt, hard candy, frosting and meat products. Von Elbe even keeps a stash of sample red M&Ms that contain betalains in their outer candy shells.
Even with its darker color, however, concentrated beet juice has yet to penetrate far into a U.S. food dye market dominated by cheaper coal-tar dyes, such as Red #2's successor, Red #40. Although sales of high pigment beet juice have risen of late, von Elbe admits, "It's a slow process."
Still, when he reflects back on that long ago day in the cannery when inspiration hit, he says, "There's no question of the progress we've made. In 1978, when we started this whole thing, there were zero pounds of beets sold for pigment. Today, there's a whole industry. There are fields of beets growing here in Wisconsin that are dedicated to pigments."
