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---
  layout: post
  title: What is natamycin
  author: Joe Schwarcz
  source: McGill Blogs
---
  HYPERLINK
"http://blogs.mcgill.ca/oss/2016/03/10/you-asked-what-is-natamycin/" 
You Asked: What is natamycin? 

  “The customer is always right,” is a time-honoured adage in
marketing. It holds true even if the customer is wrong. If the customer
does not want “artificial” preservatives” in food, industry will
comply, whether that move is supported by science or not. Of course no
company wants to poison its customers, so eliminating preservatives is a
risky business. What’s the answer? Look for a “natural”
preservative. That will satisfy the consumer who has a disdain for
anything artificial, and at the same time will reduce the worry for the
producer about marketing an unsafe product.

Kraft, for example, has announced that, at least in the U.S., it will be
replacing artificial preservatives with natural ones in its cheese
products. This boils down to not much more than a question of semantics.
Sorbic acid and its salts, the “artificial” preservatives that have
been used, are to be replaced by natamycin, an antifungal compound
produced by soil bacteria. Although many cheeses are actually mould
ripened, with blue cheese being the classic example, cheese is also
prone to infection by a variety of rogue moulds that can cause spoilage.
Sorbic acid and its salts can prevent the growth of moulds, yeast and
fungi, even when used at concentrations of less than 0.1%. It was back
in 1859 that Professor August Wilhelm Hofmann first isolated sorbic acid
by distilling the oil obtained from the berries of the rowan tree. This
is the same Professor Hofmann who was enticed to England by Prince
Albert to head up the newly created Royal College of Chemistry and who
essentially founded the synthetic dye industry.

So, doesn’t the fact that sorbic acid can be isolated from berries
make it a “natural” substance? Yes. And I suppose there would be no
clamoring to remove it from food if this is how it were produced. But
distilling sorbic acid from rowan berries is not an economical process
and would not do for the estimated 30,000 tons needed every year by the
food industry. But sorbic acid can also be readily produced by a number
of synthetic methods, including the reaction of crotonaldehyde with
ketene, both of which can be made from compounds isolated from
petroleum. This synthesis is economically viable and is the way that
sorbic acid is produced. Any chemical is defined by its molecular
structure which does not depend on the route by which it was produced.
The sorbic acid produced by the rowan berry is identical to the sorbic
acid produced by chemical synthesis, but because the latter was not
extracted from a natural source, it is termed “artificial,” and
therefore in the eyes of some people, suspect. The fact is that sorbic
acid, irrelevant of the source, is a food additive that has passed all
the regulatory hurdles just like its replacement, natamycin.

Natamycin is an antifungal agent produced by a soil bacterium that was
first found in South Africa’s Natal province, hence the name. Since
bacteria occur in nature, any of the chemicals they crank out can be
classified as “natural.” But curiously a substance that occurs in
nature, like sorbic acid, is termed an artificial preservative when it
is synthesized in the lab. Natamycin may be natural, but it would not be
so appealing to people if they knew they were eating the waste product
of dirt bacteria. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Joe Schwarcz PhD – March 10th/2016