Flavor

by Bob Holmes

  It’s hard to come away from Doty’s clinic with the feeling that flavor makes much difference in maintaining body weight. But what does, then? Why do some people gain weight while others don’t? And, the big question: What can we do about it? Unfortunately, scientists still haven’t agreed on an answer. Mark Friedman thinks—and he has some research to back him up—that overweight people’s metabolism has shifted so that the energy they take in from meals is more likely to get stored as fat, and less likely to be available for the daily needs of living and moving around. “You’re losing energy internally that you can’t get to, so you eat more,” he explains. “Essentially, you’re overeating because you’re getting fat.”

  On the other hand, Dana Small thinks—and there’s a lot of evidence to back her up—that overweight people are less sensitive to their body’s satiety signals, so that they’re less likely to shut down their food intake when they should. Instead, they tend to eat from habit, because it’s time, or they walk through the kitchen, or because they drive near the golden arches. In the absence of a good satiety signal, they’re more vulnerable to the pull of their reward system, even when they’re not actually hungry. Even rats sometimes overeat merely because the food is there. In one study, just putting extra containers of sugary or fatty food in a rat’s cage was enough to get it to eat more of the abundant calories. Similarly, rats that can choose among six different water bottles get almost twice as fat if five of the bottles contain sugar water than they do when just one bottle has sugar water. They could have drunk just as much sugar water from the single bottle—the researchers kept it full—but something about having so many sugary options made a difference.

  The bottom line here seems to be that flavor does make a difference to what we eat, and indirectly to how much we eat. Flavor-nutrient conditioning pulls us toward wanting the calorie-laden foods that are so readily available these days. But even though flavor is part of the overeating equation, tinkering with flavor may not be part of the solution. Making food more or less flavorful probably won’t change consumption in the long run. No matter how enticingly you flavor that no-fat rice cake, your body will still know there’s nothing much there—and will quickly learn that those flavors aren’t worth liking. Given a choice between a full-fat cheese and a reduced-fat version, the reward systems in our brains will clamor for the full-fat one. Any food company that tries to sell the reduced-fat version has to fight this innate emotional pull—usually by appealing to reason and prudence, which have a hard time competing against yearning. Often, food companies don’t even try, and when they do they frequently lose. That’s why frozen pizzas have as much cheese as they do, and why French fries remain so popular on fast-food menus. They’re the intensely researched result of the flavor companies that design, make, and test the flavors in processed foods.

  Chapter 6

  WHY NOT IGUANA?

  When Bob Sobel’s kids were little, they would sometimes run up to a strange man in the grocery store and hug his leg, saying, “Hi, Grandpa!” Eventually, Sobel figured out the reason for the error: Their mental sketch of “Grandpa” consisted of gray hair, glasses, and a beard—and anyone who satisfied those criteria, they figured, must be Grandpa. It didn’t take many failures before Sobel’s kids upgraded their sketch, of course, but he has always remembered how little information they needed at first to leap to their conclusion.

  It’s a lesson Sobel—no relation to Noam Sobel of the chocolate-soaked string—puts to use every day in his job, as vice president for research at FONA International, a company in the business of creating flavors for the food industry. Designing flavors is largely a matter of finding a way to sketch a chemical likeness—a caricature, if you will—of reality. Case in point: Sobel likes to give people a fresh apple and a Jolly Rancher green-apple-flavored hard candy. “Which one has more chemicals?” he asks. Most people assume that it’s the patently artificial Jolly Rancher. But nature is made of chemicals, too. The real apple, in fact, contains at least twenty-five hundred different flavor chemicals, while the Jolly Rancher has precisely twenty-six. What makes the flavor industry possible is that our mental image of “apple flavor” doesn’t require all twenty-five hundred chemicals. “Just like our picture of Grandpa, it’s going to pick out a few,” says Sobel. That’s exactly what Jolly Rancher has done with their apple candy. “It has enough information to give you the apple. The goal of flavor chemists is not to duplicate exactly all 2,500 flavor chemicals that nature uses. It’s to re-create the impression.”

  Sobel is explaining all of this in his well-modulated, gently sibilant voice in an auditorium at FONA’s headquarters in Geneva, Illinois, a bucolic suburb of Chicago. In an industry notorious for its obsessive secrecy, FONA is unique in flinging wide its doors to let the sun shine in. Several times a year they welcome clients, competitors, and the odd hanger-on like me to Flavor 101, a free short course in the workings of the flavor industry.

  In the room with me are two chewing-gum developers from Wrigley, people from Butter Buds Food Ingredients (a manufacturer of dairy flavorings), Grapette (a maker of soft drink flavors), and PepsiCo (which needs no introduction). There’s someone from a company that makes vegetarian “meat” products. There are representatives of processed-food makers, pharmaceutical companies, a major liquor company, and a food-packaging company. There are several new hires at FONA itself. And, along with me, one other outsider—an anthropologist studying the food industry.

  Sobel’s long face, slightly protruding lower lip, and pleasant smile make him look a bit like a 1980s-vintage TV news host. He has the enthusiastic demeanor of a good high school chemistry teacher, which is what he once was. Back in 1999, his wife suggested he take an outside job during the summer holiday. He ended up working as a flavor analyst at FONA and discovered a world he’d never known of. Entranced, he’s been there ever since.

  That’s a sentiment I encountered over and over from professional flavorists. Playing with chemicals to concoct a flavor is a bit magical and a lot of just plain fun. It’s applied chemistry of the most appealing sort. Most chemists work with unpleasant, often toxic substances and go to great lengths to avoid inhaling or ingesting their products. Flavor chemists, on the other hand, do it all the time.

  Flavor chemistry is also a big, big business. Flavor companies sell more than $10 billion worth of flavorings every year, and the products that result can be found in nearly every kitchen. Almost every convenience food, almost every processed food, almost every fast-food product relies on added flavorings, both to make the food more appealing and to provide consistency from batch to batch. Flavorings are the reason your favorite bottled spaghetti sauce always tastes the same, even though one batch of tomatoes might be sweeter and more fragrant than the next. Flavorings help your strawberry yogurt taste like strawberry yogurt rather than just yogurt with strawberries in it. Flavorings help diet-food companies keep their products appealing even as they reduce the fat. And, according to some critics, flavorings interfere with our bodies’ natural ability to select a balanced diet, which could make them a key player in the modern epidemic of obesity—a charge we’ll return to later.

  The modern flavor industry really began in the 1950s, when chemists developed a tool that let them separate, sort, and identify the individual molecules that make up a flavor. This tool, called a gas chromatograph, separates the molecules by how fast they travel through a long, coiled tube—a speed that depends on the molecule’s size, shape, and electric charge. If the tube is long enough, each kind of molecule will finish at a different time, and a chemist waiting at the end can catch and identify them one by one as they emerge.

  Suddenly, flavor chemists had the detailed knowledge they needed to take flavors apart and build them up again, brick by brick, instead of relying on crude extracts of natural products. The design of flavor changed from an arcane art into a quantitative science. As chemists built up their understanding of which molecules contribute which aromas to a flavor—methyl anthranilate s
mells like grape, gamma-nonalactone like coconut, furfuryl mercaptan like freshly ground coffee—the flavorists’ tool kit exploded in size. Today, a well-equipped industrial flavorist can choose among over seven thousand different molecules and extracts when assembling the components of a flavor.

  Learning how they do that is why I’m here in Flavor 101, listening to flavorist Menzie Clarke explain how she puts together a flavor. Clarke is a small woman of Asian ancestry with a broad smile and boundless enthusiasm for her craft. This enthusiasm surfaces in her rapid speech, as her words tumble out half formed, propelled by the pressure of her racing thoughts.

  For many flavors, she says, you start with a so-called character compound—a molecule that shrieks out a particular flavor so loudly that it’s almost impossible to build that flavor without it. If you smell amyl acetate, for example, you’ll instantly recognize it as banana. Likewise eugenol and clove, or citral and lemon. If your flavor has a character compound, you’re halfway home already.

  Next, you layer on some “top notes,” the up-front quick hits of flavor that burst onto the palate but fade quickly. These lack the immediate recognition of the character compounds, but often deliver a more generic quality. For example, ethyl butyrate delivers a fresh, fruity top note to many citrus flavors. Bottom notes, in contrast, build slowly but linger longer—vanillin is a good example, or the creaminess of delta-lactones—to add fullness to the flavor.

  With the skeleton of the flavor in place, you start to think about differentiators, the elements that add subtle highlights to the particular flavor you’re building. If you want a slightly mealy note to an apple flavor, for example, you might add a little tagette oil. If you’d prefer a greener note, use a bit of cis-3-hexenol instead. Add a little furaneol for more of a baked-apple flavor—or add a lot for a candy-apple flavor.

  Finally, you pay attention to the balance of the flavor. “You don’t want your flavors to have spikes,” says Clarke. “You want them nice and balanced, a very clean flavor.” Often, that means keeping things simple—but Clarke’s “simple” seems an awful lot like my “complex.” “You don’t want to use more than 30 to 40 flavor components,” she says. “Once you get to more than 40, it gets kind of messy. You wonder if it’s really necessary.”

  The process sounds straightforward, but of course the reality is often a lot more complex. Sometimes, for example, key flavor molecules turn out to be very short-lived. A molecule important in the flavor of fresh watermelon, for example, breaks down within thirty seconds of release, so it can’t be used in a commercial watermelon flavor. “Everybody wants to have that fresh watermelon flavor,” says Sobel. “The problem is, you only get that flavor when you actually bite into a watermelon.”

  That’s not the only example, either. Short-lived 2-acetylpyrazine provides the ephemeral popcorny aroma in freshly made basmati rice, which flavorists cannot reproduce successfully. The furfuryl mercaptan that makes the character note of freshly ground coffee also vanishes quickly. That’s why the first whiff of a freshly opened can of coffee is so much better than reopening the same can the next morning. (It’s also why coffee tastes so good in a coffee shop—all the grinding and brewing they do ensures a steady infusion of furfuryl mercaptan into the air, where it can enhance your flavor experience.)

  The next morning, in Sobel’s office, I ask Clarke if she would talk me through a real flavor formula. I’m not hopeful, because most formulas are closely guarded trade secrets, but Sobel surprises me: He’s able to pull out an example that’s publicly available, a pineapple flavor originally developed by International Flavors and Fragrances, one of the big flavor companies. It’s not too complex, having just sixteen ingredients, so it seems like a good choice for analysis.

  Clarke recognizes the flavor as pineapple—even before anyone says the word—because of the presence of allyl caproate, a character compound for pineapple. “If I see allyl caproate in a flavor, I directly go into pineapple mode,” she says. Then Clarke starts to pick apart the rest of the recipe. Ethyl butyrate and ethyl acetate (“the ethyls,” she calls them) supply generically fruity top notes. A set of three acids—acetic, butyric, and caproic—also add bright top notes. Acetic acid, of course, is vinegar. Caproic acid smells a bit goaty, while the odor of butyric acid is often described as “baby vomit.” (Perfumers know that a bit of something nasty—cat pee, for instance—can often add a little depth and complexity to a fragrance; the same is true in the world of flavor. Wine connoisseurs often discern a whiff of cat pee in the aroma of sauvignon blanc wines.)

  Next come a couple of chemicals—terpinyl propionate and ethyl crotonate, if you care—that contribute a husky, rindy character to the flavor. These probably serve as differentiators, helping to make this particular pineapple flavor a little different from all the others.

  The rest of the flavor formula consists of tiny amounts of several essential oils—oil of sweet birch, oil of spruce, oil of orange, oil of lime, oil of cognac, and others. Instead of being single chemicals, each of these oils is a mix of many different flavor compounds and, as their names imply, are usually extracted from a natural source. “These are to be creative,” says Clarke. Differentiators again, in other words. Some, such as oil of cognac, also supply heavier, lingering bottom notes to the flavor.

  But the ingredients list alone isn’t enough to make a flavor. You also need them in the right proportions—and that can be tricky. Should the allyl caproate be 5 percent by weight, or 4 percent or 6 percent? You’ll have to test it to know for sure. And there are other pitfalls, too. Merely doubling the concentration of a flavor molecule doesn’t always double its intensity. Sometimes the quality of the flavor changes instead. Linalool often gives a nice blueberry character at a concentration of .02 percent, for example, but at .025 percent it can lose its blueberryness and take on an unbalanced floral quality—a phenomenon flavorists call “flavor burn.” (This means that food companies can’t just crank up the flavor dial to compensate for an aging population’s fading senses. They’ll need to rebalance every flavor at its new intensity—a much bigger task.)

  Flavor 101 was a great way to learn the basics of the flavor industry—but to dig deeper into its intricacies, I needed to get my hands dirty. I headed east on a pilgrimage to the epicenter of flavor.

  Cincinnati, Ohio, seems like an unlikely candidate for the flavor capital of North America. It’s an unassuming midwestern city full of unassuming midwestern people of largely German extraction who live in unassuming midwestern two-story brick houses with friendly front porches and well-kept lawns. Gastronomically, its claims to fame are a pork-and-oatmeal breakfast sausage and something called “Cincinnati chili,” which is not chili at all but a cinnamon-spiced meat sauce usually served over spaghetti or hot dogs. Yet just a short drive north from the center of town, you’ll find a nondescript industrial park with several unassuming brick-and-glass buildings that house the U.S. headquarters of Givaudan, the world’s largest manufacturer of flavors.

  You’ve undoubtedly tasted some of their flavors. We all have, or at least everyone who’s ever bought a food product other than a raw fruit, vegetable, or meat, or drunk anything other than water, beer, or wine. Givaudan’s flavors show up in soups, soft drinks, cookies, candies, frozen dinners, fast food, and almost any other food product you can think of. Yet you’ll never find their name on the label. Nor will anyone from Givaudan ever let slip the name of any product that uses their flavor. Dr Pepper/Snapple, the giant beverage conglomerate, has a factory right across the parking lot from Givaudan’s facility. Givaudan’s spokesman says it’s entirely coincidental that a drink manufacturer happened to set up shop right next to a flavor developer, but he also can neither confirm nor deny that the company is one of Givaudan’s clients. The level of secrecy involved would make the CIA proud.

  I’ve been trying for more than a year to arrange a visit to one of the big four flavor companies, or “flavor houses,” as they’re known in the trade. (Besides Givaudan, the others are Fir
menich, International Flavors and Fragrances, and Symrise. The flavor industry also includes a dozen or so middle-tier firms—FONA among them—and dozens of tiny flavor houses, often specializing in a niche market like grape or dairy flavors.) Mostly, it’s been a long, frustrating sequence of unanswered e-mails, unreturned phone calls, and general silence. They just don’t want people to know. Finally, though, I got lucky. Someone I met at a conference knew someone who had just retired from Givaudan, who must have pulled some strings with Jeff Peppet, the company’s communications officer. Suddenly Peppet, who had been ignoring my e-mails and voice mails for months, actually got back to me and offered—O Fortuna!—to arrange a visit. And so, to my astonished disbelief, here I am at last, parking my car and walking in the front door of Givaudan.

  In person, Peppet—who appears to be in his midforties, with expensively cut hair—couldn’t be more helpful and welcoming. He’s set up a full day’s worth of interviews for me, spanning a large part of Givaudan’s flavor development work. (He even warned me away from the Cincinnati chili when I asked for dinner recommendations.) But the part I was most interested in was a session with flavorist Brian Mullin, who was going to let me build a simple flavor for myself.

  Mullin’s about sixty, with a full head of graying hair; wide thin lips bracketed by deep smile lines; and a firm, friendly gaze. He’s got the slightly raffish demeanor of a favorite uncle who’s always enjoyable. He insists on shaking my hand, even after I mention I have a slight cold, instead of yanking his hand away hastily like every other flavorist I met. (A flavorist with a cold is like a warehouse worker with a bad back—they can’t do their job, and have to fill the time with paperwork.) It’s good to challenge your immune system, he says.