How can mass produced products like Salsa taste the same every time when the vegetables they contain have so many variables?
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People have talked about scale of food preparations, and that is probably part of it, but at least for something like orange juice, there’s a whole other aspect to it. Commercial pasteurized orange juice is far more processed than you’d probably think so that juice companies can control the precise flavor:
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/orange-juice-moms-secret-ingredient-worries/story?id=15154617
A large percentage of what defines the taste of a consumable product nowadays are synthetic/chemical. The same applies in fragrances. That’s what keeps the consistency and guarantees your sales
There’s another factor besides batch size and quality control: this is more relevant to juice, but it applies to things like jarred salsa. Food companies extract flavor chemicals out of the fruit and vegetables, then recombine them according to a specific recipe. It’s still 100% oranges or whatever, but they also turned those oranges into flavor syrups and mixed them according to the desired flavor.
There’s actually a great story about how basically the largest orange juice manufacturer specifically sorts their oranges according to a huge variety of factors and then uses a computer algorithm to make sure the juice always taste the same no matter what by mixing
It’s also part of quality control and quality assurance’s job to ensure that the product looks, smells, feels, and tastes the same every time. They typically have a bunch of different tests they can perform on every new batch to make sure it is as close to the same every time.
Not sure why OP is asking about salsa specifically… or just vegetables.
Anything mass produced goes for consistent taste. Fast food places are like this.
Coffee. Beer. Wine etc… are all like this. Stuff is made in huge quantities, and everything is blended together.
Lastly, you won’t notice a difference when many other ingredients are added and especially if you are not tasting something year after year after year.
At some point, if you were to get ‘vintages’ of salsa you would notice a difference. I’m sure if you were to do side by sides of hot sauces (consider that Tabasco takes 5 years to make) you would be able to taste a difference from year to year.
Even then… some of that comes to down to the aging process itself, so you may or may not be tasting the difference of the ingredient changing over the year. Because then it comes down to what happened during the growing season and the temps over the aging process.
That being said, greenhouse growing and hydroponics would yield very consistent year after year flavors.
Each product has a specification sheet indicating specific values like acidity, pH , degree brix etc….it’s a matter of adjusting for many of this items.
Ooooh snap, just a little side story. In the Netherlands they have a tv programme where they research foodstuff. And they did a episode on sunflower oil. Where they made a beautifull product from pure sunflower seeds, full of taste and awesome overall. Then…. They removed all flavour and colour, chemically, and added foodcolouring and artificial taste so everything was always the same…..
Several reasons:
**Quality Control:** This means many things: They only pick vegetables that fall within a certain range of characteristics. They adjust the formulation and/or process based on the available materials. And they constantly test during the process to make sure the final product is going to have the corrected taste.
**Law of averages.** You buy two tomatoes, one may be sweeter than the other, the other more acidic. But, when your recipe calls for 30,000 gallons of tomatoes it tends to average out.
**Specific suppliers:** You can always buy from a specific supplier that produces the vegetable to your specifications.
Can’t speak for salsa, but I suspect it would be the same as orange juice.
Step 1: Remove all flavors from your ingredients.
Step 2: Mix those flavorless zombie ingredients.
Step 3: Add “natural” “flavor packets.”
Results: same flavor every time. And as a bonus, the flavorless zombie pulp tends to last longer than its fresh squeezed counterpart. This means you can store large quantities during harvest and continue to produce all year round.
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