Powder, Gel or Liquid Food Colouring: What a Bakery Should Use

All three can carry the same colour. What changes is what the colour is carried in, and that decides how much of everything else you add to the recipe along with it.

The moisture point matters more than it looks. Royal icing, macaron shells and chocolate all react badly to extra water, and that's exactly where liquid colour lets you down first.

We'd rather you buy the right thing. Keep gels for:

• Decorating a few cakes a day in many different shades, where a pot per colour is simpler than mixing.
• Deep shades such as red or black in a small bowl of buttercream, where you want the colour ready to use.
• Front-of-house decorating, where staff work by eye rather than by recipe card.

If that's your whole operation, a 25kg bag is the wrong pack size for you. Once the same shade goes into batch after batch, powder starts to make more sense.

Powder earns its place wherever colour is part of a recipe rather than a finishing touch:

• Dry blends. Cake premixes, seasoning and sugar coatings take powder straight in, with nothing to dry out.
• Syrups and drinks. A water-soluble powder such as Dulzer tartrazine E102 powder in a 25kg bag dissolves into the liquid base. Its product page lists soft drinks, jellies, sauces, snack seasoning and bakery among its uses.
• Repeatable batches. Weighing grams on a scale is more repeatable than counting drops, so the tenth batch matches the first.
• Pack size. One sealed bag or drum covers a long production run, instead of a shelf of small pots that run out at different times.

This is the question that catches bakers out. A water-soluble powder colours anything with water in it. Chocolate, compound coatings, cream fillings and other fat-based systems need a different kind of powder: a lake.

In United States food law, a lake is defined as a water-soluble colour combined with aluminium or calcium and deposited on an alumina base. The practical result is on our product pages: the Dulzer lake colours are described as insoluble in water and dispersible in oils and fats, which is why they colour a coating without bleeding into the layer next to it.

Our lake range comes in 10kg drums, including lake tartrazine yellow E102, lake brilliant blue E133 and lake Allura red. For a fuller walk through the water soluble grades and the fat dispersible lake colours, see our guide to food colour powders for B2B use.

Powder is strong, so never tip it straight into a full mixer. A simple bench test saves a wasted batch:

1. Make a stock solution for water-soluble powder: weigh 1 g of colour into 100 ml of water and stir until it's fully dissolved. Every 1 ml of that solution now carries 0.01 g of colour.
2. Colour a small test portion of your real recipe, adding the solution 1 ml at a time, and write down every millilitre.
3. Bake or set the test portion. Colour often looks different after baking and once a coating has set, so judge the finished piece, not the raw mix.
4. Compare test pieces side by side under the same light, then scale the winning amount up to the full recipe by weight.

For a lake colour going into chocolate or a coating, do the same test with a weighed pinch of powder rubbed into a little melted fat first, so it spreads evenly. How much colour a product may carry depends on the food category and the rules that apply where you sell it, so check that before you lock in a recipe. We can send a certificate of analysis (COA) for any Dulzer colour on request.

For a one-off decorating job, yes: mix a little water-soluble powder into a few drops of water to make a paste. For daily decorating work, a ready-made gel is usually less fuss.

No. Water-soluble colour doesn't disperse in fat and tends to speckle. Chocolate and fat-based coatings need an oil-dispersible lake colour.

Yes. The Dulzer colour product pages state halal certification, Seoul Oasis handles stock under HACCP, and our range complies with UAE food import standards. A COA is available on request.

Keep it sealed, dry and away from heat, and reseal it straight after weighing. Humid air makes powder colour clump, which makes it harder to weigh accurately.

See every shade, bag and drum in our food colouring powder collection. Live prices are on each product page. You can pay online or by company bank transfer, and UAE delivery is free on orders above AED 300.