How Flavor Chemists Make Your Food So Addictively Good

If you eat processed foods — which most of us do — there's a good chance you've tasted something that was designed by a flavor chemist. But getting pre-packaged foods to taste exactly the way they do is no easy task. It's a process that requires everything from supertasting chemists to the sourcing of hundreds of complex ingredients. Here's how these flavor engineers make you keep coming back for more.

The flavor industry


How Flavor Chemists Make Your Food So Addictively Good



Moreover, they have to create flavors that don't just make the end consumers happy — but their clients as well (they are typically outsourced by food manufacturers). Most of all, they also have to help the food companies make huge profits.

Flavor profiling

Flavor chemists do more than just mix compounds — they have to be supertasters as well. Many of them attend cooking clinics and follow the work of famous chefs. Moreover, they also have to know the in's and out's of taste — and that's a very complex set of sensory experiences.

How Flavor Chemists Make Your Food So Addictively Good


A company like Givaudan, a Swiss firm that employs nearly 9,000 people in 45 countries, has created thousands of flavors that are used in a variety of products. In order to come up with all these tastes, whether it be the mimicry of an existing flavor or something completely new, flavor chemists often work to modify existing aromas and tastes as opposed to creating abstract smells from scratch; they're basically trying to ‘improve' upon the original (what is often a requirement in processed or pre-packaged foods). Interestingly, the two most commonly simulated flavors are chicken and strawberry.

After finding something they like — say a delicious, ripe orange — flavorists extract the fruit's flavor molecules for further analysis (either by sourcing the vast scientific literature on the subject, or through lab techniques like gas chromatography and and mass spectrometry). They then go about the process of finding a way to simulate or improve upon the original taste.

For example, when designing fruit flavors, they try to create a bursting flavor sensation at the beginning, followed by a finish that doesn't linger. And fascinatingly, flavorists can create an incredibly diverse array of experiences from a single source; Givaudan has developed 750 flavors of orange, tangerine, and mandarins. Subtle variations include jammy, sweet, floral, seedy, and so on.

A little too tasty?

Flavorists also try to create foods that consumers crave. And in fact, in a recent interview with CBS, Givaudan employees did not deny that this is what they're trying to do — create food addictions. It's "a good word," they admitted, and that they're trying to develop "something that [consumers] want to go back for again and again."


Mmmmm, isoamylacetate


How Flavor Chemists Make Your Food So Addictively Good

When trying to simulate the taste of chocolate, for example, flavorists will use substances that individually taste and smell like potato chips, cooked meat, peaches, raw beef fat, cooked cabbage, human sweat, dirt and other distinctly un-chocolate-like aromas. And in fact, in some cases it can get quite weird; some strawberry and vanilla flavors are derived from the gland found in a beaver's backside.

Once the compounds have been selected, the chemists use a "flavor profile" to help them architect the taste they're trying to simulate. This profile is typically constructed with mathematical assistance, allowing the chemists to make the most minutest of adjustments — what's typically measured in parts per million (ppm). They also need to be sensitive to how all the various chemicals might react to one another, and whether the mixtures will lend themselves to cooking.

And in terms of the chemicals themselves, it's a veritable rainbow of possibilities.




Mmmm, food never tasted so complicated.

Other sources: CBS,, Scienceagogo, Discovery.

Top image: brickrena/shutterstock. Inset images: Givaudan, Nata-Lia/shutterstock.