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I. Introduction
Colour plays an important role in the industrial production of foodstuffs, not least by making foods more visually appealing to consumers. Nevertheless, all colour is not created equally and the issue has become increasingly complex from a legal perspective. The publication of the Southampton study1 on food additives unsettled consumers about the possible effects of the artificial azo dyes. The legislator in turn in a reaction that was more politically desired than scientifically justified2 will require warning labels as of July 2010 on foods using certain azo colours. This development prompted manufacturers increasingly to seek natural alternatives to artificial colours. Of course, even in the "natural colours"world not all colours are created equally, as they can be classified into those colours which occur naturally (identical to natural substances) and those which are in addition from a natural source and traditionally processed as recently outlined in a position paper by NATCOL, the Natural Food Colour Association.3 In addition, a certain trend towards using so-called "colouring foodstuffs" is observable on the market.
II. Lack of a legal definition for "colouring foodstuff"
The traditional understanding of the term "colouring foodstuff" comprises products which were manufactured from foods and which themselves are foods. However due to their colouring properties they are intentionally primarily used for colouring other foods4; frequently, colouring foodstuffs are mixtures of various plant concentrates or extracts. Currently, there is no legally binding definition of colouring foodstuffs, even though this would have been reasonable as part of the recent revision of the European food additive legislation. Nevertheless, we can at least understand from Recital 5 of Regulation (EC) 1333/20085 that a colouring foodstuff is primarily added to food for a technological function, i.e. to impart colour. When looking at the legal definition of "food colour" in Annex I No. 2 Regulation (EC) 1333/2008, there is a category of food colours which are distinct from colouring foodstuffs only because they are not consumed as foods as such and not normally used as characteristic ingredients of food, or in the case of colour imparting "preparations" obtained from food or other edible natural source materials, there is a selective chemical/physical extraction of the pigments relative to the nutritive or aromatic constituents which draws the arbitrary but legal...