How do companies create flavours like fruits,coffee etc without using actual fruit or coffee?
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They create flavours very reminiscent of those flavours. For example, rotten wood and beacer glands are very similar to vanilla. But a lot cheaper.
These are called “esters”. They are chemicals that artificially replicate certain tastes and smells.
If you’ve ever had a banana flavored candy, that was an ester. Most natural fruit juice is way too weak in taste to be used in flavoring, so if you’ve ever had strawberry chewing gum that claims to be made with “real fruit juice”, it’s a few drops of juice and a ton of esters.
All flavors come from different molecules interacting with your senses of taste and smell. Food scientists figure out which molecules create which flavors, then either extract or synthesize those molecules. Then they can be added to anything to create the desired flavor combination.
My stepfather is a chemist and produces a lot of E number chemicals, like sweeteners, flavourings etc including MSG.
From what I’ve learned over the years of talking to him, most of the flavourings are created in a similar way to yoghurt. You take a natural product like tomato, soy, mushroom, leaves of a specific plant etc and you introduce a bacteria culture to it, the bacteria culture “eats” the product and creates a bi-product which is either refined or used in further fermentations to produce chemicals which coincidentally have certain properties which people are willing to pay for. Either they colour a food, flavour a food, thicken a food, preserve a food, or any of the other additive qualities people look for.
He produces his MSG at almost zero cost, because he extracts a certain chemical from mushrooms and garlic used as a supplement for race horses and is left with a lot of bio waste. So he worked out if he added a certain bacteria culture, he could produce MSG for free since the bacteria stays alive so long as you feed it regularly.
Flavourings can also occur naturally in a similar way within a plant or in nature where a chemical reaction takes place without human interaction, so certain animal glands can be harvested for dyes or certain insects can be used for flavourings.
If you want a primitive, non industrial version of what my stepfather does, look up how people used to and still produce “royal blue” dye by fermenting shellfish.
Tons of testing and chemical engineering. Every taste/smell compound is a complex mix of many chemicals. The goal is to isolate each one, replicate them, and then mix the fake ingredients to make a copy. Sometimes it only takes a couple of chemicals to make a close enough match. In high school chemistry we made artificial grape and banana flavors. The lab smelled so good that day.
Depends on the flavour. Some are relatively simple, composed only out of a few molecules easy to recreate using chemistry. Some fruity flavouring or floral scents fall into this category.
For others, that might be more chemically complex, there’s a simple process using cheap ingredients that can recreate them. Savoury flavours (meats etc.) can be made out of literal soy sauce or yeast by heating them up with some acids and bases in the right way.
Finally, there are flavours that consist of dozens of molecules in varying concentrations, and changing or missing anything tastes noticeably “off”. Those are usually just made from natural extracts (as in, literally extracting the molecules from the real thing), because trying to synthesise them would be a more expensive pain in the ass than just using the real thing. Some other fruit flavours, chocolate etc. are like that.
The basic process is that a company picks a target (let’s say mango), then they look at the chemicals in a bunch of mangoes, and try to figure out what chemicals taste and smell like mango. There are usually hundreds, but two or three of them do a lot of the work. Then they look at those primary chemicals and try and figure out how to make them in a lab. Maybe it’s by combining other chemicals to make new chemicals, or maybe it’s by finding microbes that do the work for us.
Step 1: Use chemistry to isolate and identify a the most dominant flavor compounds in a food. Step 2: Find a way to synthesize these chemicals in bulk, or refine them from much less expensive ingredients. Step 3: Mix the chemicals into the approximate ratio that they’re found in nature, or more often, the least unpalatable ratio, since the artificial ingredients aren’t anywhere as good as the real thing. Step 4: Add it to cheap, low-quality food, and mediate it with lot so sugar, salt, and fat so as to make it appealing in spite of its cruder base flavor profile.
For a simple example, artificial vanilla is made from vanillin, an organic compound found in vanilla beans, but is chemically derived from guaiacol. Guaiacol is produced from the oxidation of lignin, ie: burning wood, and that’s why, for example, aging bourbon in charred oak barrels imparts vanilla flavors to that beverage. However, most vanilla is produced from guaiacol distilled during oil refining (yum).
Think of a fruit like a blueberry or a strawberry. If you imagine the fruit as a recipe, the recipe is made of a bunch of different ingredients. Each ingredient may be unique to that specific fruit, or it may be used in a variety of different fruits.
The ‘ingredients’ are organic or synthetic compounds called aromachemicals. Each one contributes a specific scent/taste. Strawberry for instance is primarily composed of:
Hexenol 3-cis (leafy green)
Ethyl butyrate (sweet fruity)
Delta decalactone (creamy peach)
Ethyl furanone (cinnamon sweet fruity)
Combined, you get a strawberry. These chemicals can come from different sources other than strawberry. Similarly, you use flour in making most cakes, but only use chocolate in a chocolate cake.
Labeling is a different issue and is heavily regulated in the USA. If you look at a label and something says “natural strawberry flavor with other natural flavors”, it means that the chemicals are natural, and may or may not contain chemicals that are derived from strawberries, but also has to contain strawberry juice or essence for labeling purposes.
Natural from the named fruit: all natural all from source named
Natural WONF: natural with ingredients from other natural sources than named fruit
Natural and artificial: self explanatory
Artificial: all synthetic made versions of aromachemicals
Once during middle school, McCormick seasoning company came in and did some science stuff with us. One thing was they let us sniff three different chemicals separately, and they all smelled bad. But when you combined them, it smelled like strawberry!
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