How do companies create flavours like fruits,coffee etc without using actual fruit or coffee?
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Let’s say you’ve got a brand new Lego set, but dang it they left a piece out! Well luckily you have that same piece already, but it’s a different color. It’ll still work for the build itself, even though it’s slightly different.
Basically, artificial flavor molecules are shaped the same way as natural flavor molecules, or as close enough as they can currently get. Your taste buds recognize the shape and tell your brain that it’s the corresponding flavor.
They recreate in a lab the compound that gives those things their flavor. Flavors are just molecules that bond to our tongues, sending a signal to our brains, and our brain translates that signal into flavor.
For instance, isoamyl acetate is the molecule our brains most associate with banana. So you take the organic materials you need, make isoamyl acetate, and ymadd that to something and it’s going to taste like banana. Some flavors are more complex, made of multiple compounds, and there’s other flavors in a banana that we can detect. But isoamyl acetate is the key flavor that says “banana” so it’s all banana flavored stuff uses.
What’s crazy is how much smell affects taste.
All skittle taste the same. Taste test them with your eyes and nose shut. Absolutely blew my mind.
Flavors can be thought of as Legos. Just like Legos, flavors are made up of different pieces that fit together to create a specific flavor. These pieces, or chemicals, can come from different sources, just like Legos can come from different sets..
A good example is vanilla flavor. You can get it from a plant or you can get creative and extract it from beaver poop (no that’s not what they put in food but it’s possible)
Marketing. Although actual taste does matter, a large portion of what you think it tastes like is set up by what is written on the tin.
Flavor of a specific food, let’s say vanilla, come from a set of chemicals that can either stimulate your sense of smell or taste. If you can figure out which particular chemical or chemicals do that, you might be able to make it in a lab. For instance, the big ingredient in vanilla is called vanillin. For cinnamon, it’s called cinnamaldehyde. Both of these are easy to make–you could do it at home if you had the right equipment and watched a Youtube tutorial. So, instead of spending a lot of money on extracting it from some very expensive vanilla, you can just make some vanillin in a lab and toss it in your mass-produced cake mix.
I only came in to see if anyone mentioned the raspberry & vanilla = beaver anal glands = Castoreum natural flavoring (technically the truth, beavers are natural!)
A lot of ‘flavor’ is actually due to smell. There are different similar organic compounds that contribute to different aromas. They chemically isolate the different compounds in different foods to determine what contributes to the flavor.
https://jameskennedymonash.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/table-of-organic-compounds-and-their-smells-w12.pdf
https://jameskennedymonash.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/table-of-esters-and-their-smells.jpg
The vast majority of companies do not produce the artificial flavors they use – they buy them from one single company – International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF). They are publicly traded.
Chemistry is insanely complex and fascinating. There is a NileRed video where, through many chemistry steps, he converts latex gloves into edible grape flavoring. https://youtu.be/zFZ5jQ0yuNA
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