eli5 what are “natural flavors” and why aren’t they described exactly
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Flavors are made from chemical compounds. Scientists isolate those chemical compounds and combine them to make different flavors using a flavor recipe. There are three main types you’ll hear about.
Extracts are made from the food itself. Vanilla extract is made by taking a vanilla bean and processing it to infuse the flavor in a liquid.
Natural flavor looks for cheap abundant sources of the chemical compounds and processes them to remove them and then recombine them in flavor recipes. A famous one was beaver anal gland secretions contain compounds for both raspberry and vanilla natural flavor recipes and for a time when beaver were being heavily used for fur, this substance called castoreum was used to extract these chemicals. As beaver aren’t harvested like that anymore, castoreum is expensive and no longer used.
Artificial flavor synthesizes these flavor compounds in a lab to use in these flavor recipes.
These flavor recipes are company secrets. If Sunny D put the recipe for its chemical soup used to make Sunny D taste like Sunny D (which as anyone knows, doesn’t taste very much like a fresh orange!) then it would be easier for other companies to steal and make their own drink.
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