For instance, how does something taste like a tangerine when there is no actual tangerine juice in the food or drink?
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I read somewhere that they don’t replicate flavors exactly. That is, they don’t say “lets make a fake tangerine” They make a flavor and then decide what it tastes like. If it tastes like tomato, then they now have a fake tomato flavor.
All food is made of various compounds/molecules. Taste is just chemistry. Biology is just applied chemistry.
What can be grown in nature can generally be replicated or approximated in a lab. You just have to analyze the components of the food.
Most things have a large amount of aromatic chemicals in them that make you smell and taste what it is. Artificial flavoring is usually the most present few of those, which can be synthesized in a lab or extracted through a chemical process and refined. It’s also the reason why something that claims to taste like a tangerine doesn’t quite have the same depth as a real tangerine.
Flavors come from your sense of taste reacting to a molecule. Food scientists do a crapton of work to figure out which molecules cause which tastes, then figure out how to create those molecules synthetically and how to mix them to end up with the right flavor.
For example, artificial cinnamon flavor is cinnamic aldehyde + eugenol + a touch of methyl cinnamate + a few other things. You could probably get away with just cinnamic aldehyde.
Likewise, artificial vanilla flavor could be as simple as just 4-Hydroxy-3-methoxybenzaldehyde aka vanillin.
Taste receptors/smell receptors are like little holes for molecules if you can construct another molecule, part of which fits snuggly into the hole, it will set off the receptor and the person will smell or taste that flavour.
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