Science of Taste and Flavor Design

In this fashion, the company not only screens tastants accurately and precisely, says Zoller, but “we’ve been able to miniaturize it and automate it. We’re translating biochemical activity into something that can be picked up by an instrument in a very high-throughput fashion.” Such technology has given them an edge in two areas of taste modulation attracting heightened attention: sweetness and saltiness enhancement. And they’re not just looking for an acceptable artificial sweetener or salt substitute; their goal is to improve the perception of the sweeteners and salt we already have.

The importance of balance

Taste doesn’t just rely on these types of mechanics, or we’d be able to develop some sort of logarithm to develop flavors.

“Taste is a balance,” says Mariano Gascon, vice president, R&D, Wixon Inc., St. Francis, WI. You need only consider the example of chocolate yogurt to appreciate this all-important factor of product design. Start with its taste profile. Yogurt “is sour just by its nature,” he points out, yet “you don’t think of chocolate as being sour.” So toning down the tang is the first task. Playing around with ingredients that affect the final pH has its limits, so he suggests working those that “mask the perception of the acidity, but don’t modify the pH, don’t modify the tirtratable acidity. They leave your product exactly the same as before, but the perception of sourness is different.”

Once the yogurt’s sourness is in line, the sweetness might be out of whack. If it contains a high-intensity sweetener, the effect may be even stronger. “High-intensity sweeteners are normally of two types,” Gascon says. While something like saccharin “is very nice up front,” he says, “it takes so long to release that it gives you a perception of bitterness. Then you have others like sucralose that build very slowly, but then when they hit, they hit very high and then stay in your mouth for a long time.” The goal is to clear the sweet perception from the palate quickly and cleanly, without a bitter aftertaste. The flavor modulators that do this “let you taste the sweetness, but then they’re going to block the lingering perception of sweetness,” he says. “So, in your mind, you no longer taste the sweet. It’s clean because we’ve modified the other perceptions.”

If this yogurt also happens to be reduced-fat, you’ve got to address the missing fat’s ability to carry flavors. This isn’t just a matter of mimicking fat’s mouthfeel with gums or hydrocolloids. But while texturizers improve body, “they’re not going to hold the flavor,” Gascon points out. “The way that fat coats your mouth—because it takes longer to dissolve from the tongue—holds the flavor longer.” The residence time on the palate of a water-soluble substitute can’t compare. “That’s when we have to play with perception. One of our products is going to modify the flavor so that it stays longer in the mouth. It’s going to give you a perception almost as if you had fat in your mouth, because the flavor’s going to take longer to leave your mouth.”

If designing a simple chocolate yogurt no longer sounds so simple, that’s because it’s not.

Kimberly J. Decker, a California-based technical writer, has a B.S. in Consumer Food Science with a minor in English from the University of California, Davis. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where she enjoys eating and writing about food. You can reach her at kim@decker.net.

Web Resources

Flavor Mask-erade 

Flavor Modulation in the 21st Century 

Monell Chemical Senses Center 

The Society of Flavor Chemists 

Other resources

Flavors 

Flavor enhancers 

Sensory testing 

Senomyx, Inc.