A Colombian company has developed one of the world's few commercially viable natural blue food colourings, extracted from the jagua fruit found in the country's tropical forests, according to a report by Caracol TV’s Los Informantes.

Medellín-based Ecoflora, led by chief executive Nicolás Cock Duque, spent roughly 20 years developing the pigment alongside Luis Fernando Echeverri, a pharmaceutical chemist at the University of Antioquia who first isolated the compound from jagua fruit brought back from a student field trip.

Blue is notoriously rare in nature. It requires substances capable of absorbing a very narrow band of solar radiation, Echeverri said. The jagua tree, which grows more than 15 metres tall in Colombia's Magdalena Medio region, has long been used by indigenous communities for body paint, but its commercial potential as a dye had gone unexploited.

A chance discovery

Echeverri stumbled on the pigment almost by accident, mixing extracts from fruit that students had brought back from a field trip and setting the resulting blue liquid aside. The sample sat unused for 15 years, until an employee from a local company approached him with a problem she thought it might solve.

That problem had originated years earlier, when a German consultant advising Ecoflora told Cock Duque that the discovery would be transformative if it ever happened, describing a natural blue as nothing short of "the Holy Grail of the global food industry." The remark stayed with Cock Duque for years, until the answer appeared, fittingly, in a market. On a Sunday trip to Chocó, he spotted an unfamiliar fruit at a stall and asked the indigenous vendor selling it to cut it open, revealing blue veins running through its white pulp. The chance encounter connected him back to the consultant's prediction and eventually led him to Echeverri.

The extraction process requires unripe fruit, whose juice reacts with a nitrogen-based compound to produce the pigment. Ecoflora now processes the pigment at industrial scale, sourcing all its raw material from farming operations in the Magdalena Medio region.

The product has secured approval from the US Food and Drug Administration and has been added to the Codex Alimentarius, the list of food additives permitted in more than 180 countries under the Food and Agriculture Organization and World Health Organization, alongside halal and kosher certifications. Ecoflora holds two patent families approved in more than 35 countries for the technology.

A crowded but flawed market

Jagua is not the only natural blue on the market, but its main rivals both carry drawbacks that have limited their use. Spirulina-derived phycocyanin, the most established natural blue colourant, is a protein-based pigment that degrades quickly in acidic conditions and under heat, restricting its use in fruit-flavoured drinks or yoghurt. Butterfly pea flower extract, approved by the FDA in 2021 and widely used in Southeast Asian beverages, shifts colour with pH, moving from blue toward purple or magenta as acidity rises. That trait is prized in novelty colour-changing drinks but is unsuitable where a stable, consistent blue is required.

Peer-reviewed research comparing the three pigments found that jagua blue retained its colour substantially longer than spirulina and synthetic alternatives, under both acidic conditions and prolonged storage, giving it markedly better shelf stability and making it viable across categories where its rivals fall short.

With a reliable blue now available, Cock Duque said the pigment also unlocks infinite new natural greens, pinks, purples and browns when blended with other approved colourants, shades that were previously difficult or impossible to achieve without synthetic dyes. That expanded palette matters commercially because blue-hued products have particular appeal with younger consumers. Brightly coloured sweets, drinks and dairy products aimed at children represent some of the fastest-growing categories for natural-colourant substitution, as manufacturers respond to parental demand for products free of synthetic additives. A stable natural blue gives food companies the ability to reformulate blue and blue-derived confectionery, drinks and snacks marketed to that audience, without compromising on shelf life or appearance.

The commercial stakes are considerable. The global natural-colourant market is approaching $3bn, of which close to $700mn relates specifically to blue pigments, a segment the industry had effectively been unable to serve at scale until jagua's approval. For Colombia, the venture represents a rare case of a domestically developed, patented biotechnology reaching international commercial scale, with exports now reaching manufacturers across more than 180 countries.

Beyond the balance sheet

The venture's impact reaches beyond the balance sheet. Ecoflora sources its fruit from farming and indigenous communities in the Magdalena Medio, describing them as a fundamental link in its supply chain who receive both monetary and non-monetary benefits tied to improved quality of life and more sustainable land use. The jagua tree is considered a pioneer species capable of regenerating degraded soils, including land previously affected by mining, giving the business an ecological-restoration dimension alongside its commercial one, and creating a rural income stream in a region historically associated with extractive industry rather than biodiversity-based enterprise.

The development illustrates a broader gap between Colombia's frequently cited biodiversity wealth and the small number of Colombian biodiversity-derived products that have reached global markets. Cock Duque and Echeverri have said that despite Colombians growing up hearing biodiversity described as the country's greatest asset, relatively few technologies or products drawn from it have made it to international shelves.

Jagua blue's approval across more than 180 countries, its adoption by global food manufacturers, and two decades of patented development stand as one of the clearest examples yet of that potential being converted into an export-ready product, one that began, by Cock Duque's own account, with a chance conversation about a colour that supposedly did not exist in nature.