Flavor Trends in Seasoning Snacks

But determining how a flavor combo works on a conceptual level is only the start. Snack manufacturers have to ensure that the seasoning and substrate are compatible during processing, storage and beyond, as well. Call it “chip logistics,” if you like. “Different products taste different on a rippled chip than on a flat chip, because of the surface area,” says Reid Wilkerson, president, McClancy Seasoning Co., Fort Mill, SC. While the former offers more surface area for seasoning adhesion, “a ripple chip, per square inch, has more weight,” he explains. “So you need to put a greater amount of seasoning on that chip to accommodate that.” Yet, even then, he says, your two chips “will not taste exactly the same because of the bite. Even if you had the ratios exactly right on each, there’s something about the bite and how you chew them differently, and how the pieces break up in your mouth” that alters our perception of their flavors.

Of course, the nature of the substrate itself will also influence the amount, type and application of seasoning, notes Wilkerson. “In some cases,” he says, “we have to have two different formulas for two different substrates. It’s not unusual to have two products that are the same basic profile, but we’ll do one formulation to suit a pork skin and one for a potato chip that’s totally different in flowability, ingredients and other ways.” Pretzels, he notes, are a particular challenge to season, because of their slick surfaces. “You almost need to run it back into a dryer to dry the seasonings back on top of it. Things really tend to roll off of a pretzel well,” he says. “The broken pretzel bits allow the inside of the pretzel to be exposed so you can do a slurry, and those products do just fine. It’s just that, when you put a wet seasoning on a pretzel, you’ve really got to dry it back out. And that means you need a special piece of equipment, and that’s tough.”

Familiar with a twist

Considering how much influence appetizer profiles have on snacks, it should come as no surprise that the same sort of split personality that characterizes the appetizer section—where border-crossers like Thai curry spring rolls bump up against classic onion rings—appears in snacks, as well. While snacks are hothouses for flavor innovation, they’re also bastions of culinary nostalgia. “The classic flavors for the shelf-stable dried snacks are still the strongest,” Bruns says. “The overarching idea is to incorporate slightly new elements into traditional profiles. Everybody’s got a caramel-brownie flavor, but now they’re putting a chile with it. They’re adding a unique element to the traditional to make good on the concept of familiar-with-a-twist.”

A cornerstone of the snack seasoning repertoire is cheese, but long gone are the days when a snack flavor could get away with being just cheese. One of the more-exciting developments that Bruns has seen is the acceptance of the goat, feta and stronger European cheeses in snacks. “All of a sudden,” he says, “spinach-artichoke-feta on a pita chip, or a Greek-style chip with feta and black olives, isn’t all that out there. You’ll find that kind of profile at Wal-Mart.” He’s also noticed a shift toward smoked cheeses like mozzarella, Cheddar and provolone that “really build these flavors as another dimension into the snack.” The cheese-based concepts he and his colleagues have worked on are good enough to eat: toasted Brie, aged Parmesan, blue cheese and chive, Gruyere and caramelized onion, even beer-and-cheese fondue. And every one is imaginable on a snack.

Another snack staple, “the plain-old barbecue chip’s still got life in it, it really does,” says Wilkerson. He suggests that every time someone comes out with a new kind of sauce on the market, whether it’s K.C. Masterpiece or a regional sauce, it’s an opportunity to extend that sauce’s flavor and its good name to a new snack. Marketing agreements and co-branding opportunities are the watchwords here, he says, yet while they have the potential to generate snack sales and an unmistakable brand identity, the challenge is to get everyone from both sides to agree on a profile that accurately represents the sauce and tastes good enough to sell the snack.

Salt of the earth

If you want to talk about the real classics, says Jeff Banes, culinary development manager, FONA, “there isn’t much need to go further than salt and pepper.”

As Wilkerson says, the combination makes sense: “You’re putting things together that go together. You’ve got salt and pepper on every table in every restaurant in the United States. It plays on that theme that we’ve been trying to come up with in the snack food business of pairing familiar things in ways that are novel.”

The novelty can come by way of new pepper varieties, too, from white and cracked black to pink, green and Sichuan. But the real rising tide is in the wave of specialty sea salts. “If you want to see one of the biggest trends out there,” Wilkerson says, “it’s sea salt. Several years ago, we came out with a sea salt and black pepper blend, and we’ve done sea salt and vinegar, too.” He thinks sea salt fits best in nontraditional, niche-type snacks, like blue-corn tortilla chips or whole-grain crackers, where it can capitalize on its upscale image. “It’s almost like the ‘gourmet’ salt,” he notes, adding that it’s seen as more natural, even if it actually isn’t.

What sea salt is, however, is different in both taste and functionality. “There are a variety of minerals that are present in different sea salts from different places,” Wilkerson points out, and each has an effect on the salt’s overall taste. Moreover, sea salt’s shape leads it to behave differently vis-à-vis conventional varieties on snack applications. “The Alberger process salts are flatter,” he says. “They evaporate it with the pan top off, and that way, when it dries, it dries flat. And it’s easier to plate color on.” Vacuum-evaporated salt has a similarly regular shape. “If you look at it under a microscope, it’s a square, because it’s been evaporated in a vacuum because it takes less energy,” he says.