How caramel color is made

The brown in cola is sugar cooked well past the candy caramel stage.

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The short version

Caramel color is sugar that has been cooked well past candy caramel. Makers heat a sweetener such as dextrose, sucrose or molasses, sometimes with acids, alkalis or salts, until it turns amber to dark brown and dissolves in water. It is one of the oldest and most used food colorings.

Pick a sugar base

Makers start with a nutritive sweetener such as dextrose, sucrose, invert sugar, malt syrup, molasses or a starch hydrolysate.

Goes in
Sugar Corn syrup Molasses Malted barley
Match charge to the drink

Acids, alkalis or salts, some of them ammonia compounds, decide which of four classes comes out and whether the molecules carry a positive or negative charge. A matching charge keeps a drink from clouding or settling.

Goes in
Ammonia
Cook the charged mixture

Heat is applied to the sugar and its reactant until the batch turns amber to dark brown. Some classes of caramel color are cooked from sugar alone.
Tune the color strength

Color strength is measured by how much light a 1 mg per mL solution absorbs at 610 nanometers. Batches are adjusted so a drink looks the same every time.
Pack as a liquid

The finished color is a dark, water-soluble liquid. It goes out in drums and tanks to brewers and soft drink makers.

End of the lineCaramel color Next it goes into cola, rum, soda.

Worth repeating

The first recorded large-scale use of caramel color was in 19th century brewing.
Caramel color has a burnt-sugar smell and a slightly bitter taste.
Caramel color is used to correct natural variations in color and to replace color lost to light during processing.