Anthocyanins

Among water-soluble natural pigments, anthocyanins play by far the most important role due to their widespread occurrence, imparting attractive hues and bright colors to many flowers, vegetables, fruits, and grains. However, their limited stability upon processing and storage is still a major challenge for industrial manufacturers. Consequently, synthetic pigments have frequently been preferred in the past to improve visual appearance and restore initial color shades of processed foods. Due to health concerns associated with the application of synthetic dyes, modern food processing aims at stabilizing genuine pigments, for example, by adding anthocyanins and anthocyanin-rich juice concentrates as natural colorants and coloring foodstuffs, respectively, exhibiting superior stability and high consumer acceptance. This chapter provides a general overview of anthocyanins—their occurrence in the plant kingdom with particular focus on food plants, structural features, color properties as well as intrinsic and extrinsic factors having an impact on the stability of these putative health-beneficial components. Such parameters having a significant impact on anthocyanin stability are of particular relevance for systematic process optimization in modern food industry aiming at color stabilization.