Citric acid as an effective preservative

Citric acid is a substance that is very often added to products. Not only in the food industry, but also in the cosmetics and detergent industries. You add the substance to foodstuffs for various reasons. You can do this to influence the taste, to enhance the effect of other substances and to prevent discoloration. In the latter case, it has the function of a preservative. It is also capable of making your food dishes more solid. Citric acid can be used in jams, fruit sweets and soft drinks as well.

What is citric acid?

The excipient is often confused with lemon juice. Not strange, but the two substances are essentially different. Just like lemon juice, citric acid can occur naturally in foods. The most obvious example is citrus fruit, but some vegetables and cheese can also contain this substance. Incidentally, it occurs in many more organisms; people also make it and convert it. It is also often thought that citric acid and ascorbic acid are the same thing. This is not the case either, ascorbic acid is vitamin C.

Citric acid and the E-number

Although citric acid is an organic acid, it is nowadays hardly obtained from citrus fruit. The demand has become far too great in the meantime. Nowadays we mainly extract it from sugar. A specific type of mould is used for this, which ensures that the sugar ferments, in other words, is converted. In order to do this, the fungus feeds on the sugar.

Powdered citric acid online

At Natural Spices you can buy powdered citric acid online. The acid is easily soluble in water. You can buy it in different pack sizes. For example, you can choose 1 kilo, 5 kilos or even 25 kilos. The adjuvant has E number 330 and has therefore been found safe as an additive by the European Commission. However, there are strict limits to the use of the quantity. These can be found on the European Commission's website: Food Additives Database.