Food Marketing & Technology - India May 2019 | Page 28

Ingredient
SYNTHETIC FOOD FLAVOURS-
SECRET INGREDIENTS IN FOOD
BY: FIZA NAWAZ *
G
lobalization
and
the
development
of
new
technologies have caused
significant changes in the eating habits
of the population, which, in recent
decades, has gradually introduced
foods rich in chemical additives into
everyday life. Among these substances,
micro-ingredients called flavourings
are essential for the food industry to
confer specific sensory properties of
taste and smell to processed foods.
The food taste is largely determined
by the volatile chemicals present in
it. These chemicals are extremely
important because they give food a
very specific smell; which makes up 80
to 90 percent of the sense of taste. The
mixture of these volatile chemicals is
called “flavour.”
The smell is considered to be the main
determinant of a food item's flavour.
While the taste of food is limited to
basic tastes such as: sweet; sour; bitter;
salty; umami; and other basic tastes;
the smells of a food are potentially
limitless. Therefore, the food's flavour
can be easily altered by changing
its smell while keeping its taste
similar. This concept can be very well
exemplified in artificially flavoured
jellies, soft drinks and candies, which,
while made of bases with a similar
taste, have dramatically different
flavours. This difference is mainly
due to the use of different scents or
fragrances in such products.
Flavour plays an important role in the
consumption and acceptance of food
and in the quality of life in general.
The importance of flavour in food
with regard to its palatability is well-
known, but its value to digestion and
metabolism must not be overlooked.
The flavour and taste of food stimulate
salivary flow and acid digestion.
Food must not only be palatable to be
accepted in adequate amounts over a
prolonged time, as well as it must also
be presented in sufficient variety to
achieve a balanced and nutritionally
adequate diet. These aspects are
largely a function of flavour. Therefore
considering all these factors, the
flavourings are an essential constituent
of human food.
Why are Foods Flavoured?
Most of the daily food intake, even
in industrialised countries, is freshly
prepared and its flavour is either
intrinsic or formed during cooking.
However, in line with the increasing
demand for convenience, there is a
growing range of industrially prepared
foods. The addition of scientifically/
synthetically developed flavourings is
needed to compensate for the loss of
flavour during the processing of such
foods. Another result of urbanisation
and the modern way of life is
increasing the demand for snacks, soft
drinks, desserts, confectionery and so
on. This sort of food would be most
uninteresting without the addition of
flavourings. Other than this, there are
several other factors involved to add
flavouring to the food products, which
include:
• To increase sales by incorporating
mouth-watering tastes;
• To make packaged food taste fresh;
• To give a bolder taste to processed
foods as compared to natural foods;
• To make food addictive.
Due to the high cost or unavailability
of natural flavour extracts, most
commercial flavourants are nature-
identical or synthetic.
The actual
chemicals in these two kinds of flavours
may be exactly the same, whereas the
chemical structures of the individual
molecules may be indistinguishable.
All
flavours,
including
those
intrinsically present in food, as well as
natural and artificial flavour additives,
are small chemical compounds or
mixtures of compounds, In fact, the
chemical properties and structures
of flavouring substances are exactly
what enable them to react with each
other during cooking and tend to bind
with the taste receptors in our mouths
creating distinctive flavours.
The Fundamental Differences
between Natural and
Artificial Flavours
The basic difference between a natural
and an artificial flavour is the origin of
the flavour chemicals. Natural flavours
are typically complex mixtures of
Figure 1: Chemical compounds of the flavours in a few foods
Source: http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu
Food Marketing & Technology
28
May 2019