Overview: From Fruit to Flavor

This might sound odd, but I think it would take me a very, very long time to get bored from reading about the development of the flavor industry. This week, I’ve been reading about flavor applications. Everything from the history of the analytical methods used to the gritty technical details of getting the most bang for the bite. As I’ve mentioned previously in this blog, flavors were first commonly synthesized and purified during the mid-nineteenth century, i.e., the Industrial Revolution. However, flavor compounds were not identified and tinkered with by chemists en masse until the invention of gas-chromatography mass-spectrometry (GC-MS) in the 1950’s.

GC-MS Diagram

 Not only did scientists identify and isolate many compounds that they were already peripherally aware of: they also discovered novel flavor and fragrance chemicals, including some of those sensation-causing ones I’ve been rambling on about. Critically, it was determined that flavor is dependent on key aroma compounds - molecules which must be present in order to for a certain taste to result. 

n-decanal

(wikimedia commons)

For example, it was found that n-decanal must be present for an orange to taste like an orange¹.
 Although there are other chemicals present that affect an orange’s flavor, even with their nature-designed uniquely balanced proportions, in the absence of n-decanal an orange just won’t taste right. Pretty nifty. 

In the mid-1970’s, sprectral data from GC-MS was computerized. Yay, digital revolution. Data collection went from counting signals by eye, determining the abundance of signals on UV paper, and comparing the signals present to tabulated collections of compounds. Sounds like not-fun. But it makes me infinitely grateful for the technology I have now. In ten years (or sooner?) we’ll probably be able to tell a computer what was mixed together and under what conditions and the computer output, with a high degree of certainty, what product will be. Until then, we’ll have to work with graphs and charts, albeit digital ones. 

After going through all the fruits and vegetables and whole food natural-type products, flavor companies found the research into new flavor compounds relatively unprofitable. This makes me sad. There was a forray into the flavorful world of common food reactions like fermentation and the Maillard reaction. By 2005, after cataloguing over 2,800 active compounds, the flavor and fragrance companies concluded they should perfect what they have before trying to find more tasty and smelly things. To my chagrin. There is the possibility that mixing and cooking ingredients together produces entirely unrecorded flavor and fragrance compounds but the vast majority of these combinations has not been researched. 

Marie Wright, flavorist, South Brunswick, New Jersey
Wall Street Journal "Creating Portraits"

To manage and master all the compounds we did find out about, the training of Flavorists came on the scene. This is an amazing job and what I want to be when I grow up. Here’s how the making of a flavor/fragrance compound goes: discovery of a compound in nature, perfection of synthetic imitation, painstaking purification, application of creativity to combine flavors in cool new ways, creation of a flavor profile (via an aromagraph), and playing around with the potential uses of the active compound. Upon his visit to Marie Wright's laboratory in New Jersey, Wall Street Journal Photographer Kyoko Hamada remarked: “I had been warned that Marie’s lab might be a bit like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Upon entering the lab, we were overwhelmed with the smells of bubble gum, lemon, coffee beans, chocolate, tangerine, and what I’m guessing may have been cupcake, soap, vanilla, banana and amaretto, all mixed together in what was an otherwise very stark and minimal laboratory. It was strange to think that the smells which were so omnipresent in the air were completely invisible to the naked eye….Marie, the flavorist, was a self-assured, charismatic and very charming woman who didn’t dress at all like any scientist I had photographed before. It was great pleasure to meet her and such fun to visit the lab. I am grateful that she didn’t call the Oompa-Loompas when I ended up breaking one of their beakers in all the excitement.²”

Here’s a case study: a European blueberry (billberry) of interest due to its complex taste profile (in contrast to domesticated varieties) was found to contain 132 potential aroma compounds. A complete profile was created of all the aliphatic and aromatic structures, how ripeness affects the the flavor, and how growth location affected chemical composition. Extraction and purification was done using solid-phase micro-extraction (SPME) and analysis was done with GC-MS. Then, the compounds were assigned adjectives like “mint-spicy note” (1-8,cineole) or “flowery-fruity note” (acetate) or “herb-spicy note” (terpinolene). Collecting these results creates a sort of database for the fruit.³ A chemical map.

With enough information and structural alterations, the flavorist can say, “this smells basically like the kind of blueberry I want” as the sniff the mist that sprays out of the GC-MS. Say, a perfect billberry scent. “Now,” says the flavorist, “I’m going to go into the kitchen part of my lab and try it out in a blueberry muffin mix and then eat the muffins” And the processes is repeated until the desired flavor is acheived. 

The problem, as always, is that it’s not that simple. There’s quite the leap from knowing what a food is comprised of and getting those compounds into an applicable form, which is what the rest of the chapter details. 

Therefore, next time: the many, many technical difficulties of actually getting synthetic flavor compounds into food! (And how some very smart people figured out very cool things.) 

In the meantime, enjoy this video on Goldfish Cracker production. It's always fun (scary?) to learn about how our food is made - and to think about all the details they won't include. 

Ashley

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1 Ahmed, E., Dennison, R., Dougherty, R., Richard, H., Shaw, P. “Flavor and odor thresholds in water of selected orange juice components” J. Agr. Food Chem. 26(1) pp.187-91 ^↩


2  Horne, Rebecca. "Favorite 'Creating' Portraits" Wall Street Journal 2011. Accessed 14 Oct. 2014. http://blogs.wsj.com/photojournal/2011/07/18/favorite-creating-portraits/ ^↩

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3  Rohloff, J., Nestby, R., Nes, A., Martinuseen, I. “Volatile Profiles of European Blueberry: Few Major Players, But Complex Aroma Patterns” Latvian Journal of Agronomy. 2009. 12:98-103. ^↩

4 Rowe, David J (ed.) (2005) Chemistry and Technology of Flavors and Fragrances. Blackwell Publishing: Poole. Ch.9.^↩