Creating New Flavors Takes More Than Good Taste

The next time you're enjoying your favorite packaged food or beverage, check the label to see if the ingredients include "natural and artificial flavors." Those are often part of the proverbial secret formula that gives a product its distinctive flavor and aroma—a burst of red apple, a whisper of cinnamon and so on.

Natural flavors often come from costly essential oils, which are extracted from plants, seeds, fruits or vegetables. Artificial flavors are edible chemicals that provide a lower-cost way to reproduce natural flavors and aromas. To get just the right blend of natural and artificial elements, food and flavor companies turn to people called flavorists. These specially trained scientists complement their keen senses of taste and smell with advanced instrumentation that can analyze complex flavor compounds to help ensure quality and safety.

Developing the secret formula

Several companies around the world specialize in creating flavors and aromas for producers of food, beverages, medicines, cosmetics and more. The specialist "flavor and fragrance" companies typically have just a few weeks to concoct a mixture that meets the client's requirements and also appeals to consumers.

That's where the flavorists come in. Most studied chemistry or biology and then spent years working as apprentices, training their noses and tongues to recognize thousands of ingredients. Just as a composer learns how different instruments harmonize, flavorists learn how different flavors interact: sweet, sour, bitter and salty.

Flavorists also know that roughly 85 percent of flavor comes from our sense of smell, so they usually start with the aroma and then fine tune the taste. After they've created a few promising alternatives, another group adds the flavoring to test versions of the new product, which panels of taste-testers will sample and rate. Once the testers have identified the best compound, it's made in large batches and delivered to the food producer. Of course, the exact formula is a well-kept secret.

Testing for quality and safety

To keep pace with the public's unceasing desire for new taste experiences, time-to-market is a critical success factor for flavor makers and food companies. The qualitative methods described above are essential but create a bottleneck in the development process. Saving time in other parts of the process depends on the use of analytical instrumentation to rapidly characterize essential oils and other components. Flavor makers use quantitative methods in product development and quality control, while food companies use them for incoming inspection to check for adulterated compounds and in manufacturing to ensure consistent quality and uncompromising safety.

For years, capillary gas chromatography (GC) has been the method of choice for analysis of essential oils. Many companies rely on in-house methods derived from historical choices of GCs, columns and test conditions. However, because essential oils are complex mixtures, no single capillary column can resolve all possible compounds. What's more, spectral data from gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS), another popular technique, are not always conclusive because isomers give similar spectra.

Exploring new methods

Agilent application chemists, in cooperation with Quest International in the Netherlands, have developed two testing methods that save time by enabling automatic searching of flavor compounds in food extracts or essential oil constituents. These methods, based on retention times and mass spectra measurements, are detailed in the application note "Analysis of Essential Oil Compounds Using Retention Time Locked Methods and Retention Time Databases."

The Agilent 6890 is the foundation of GC/FID and GC/MS solutions for the analysis of essential oil compounds.

The application note presents the results of two approaches, GC/FID (flame ionization detector) and GC/MS, that were enhanced with retention time locking (RTL). RTL accelerates the analysis process by pinpointing exactly where a compound should elute, eliminating the need to run a retention index mix and do the subsequent calculations. By using RTL and a screener library with either GC/FID or GC/MS, analysis of essential oil constituents was faster and more accurate than traditional GC methods alone.

The application note also describes how, under specific operational conditions, retention indices from an existing retention time library can be transferred into a locked retention time database. The database can then be used with any GC detector to provide faster analysis.

These methods are a powerful complement to the subjective, qualitative part of flavor development. By adding fast, versatile quantitative analysis tools to the mix, flavorists can increase their confidence in the quality and safety of their latest secret formula.

For more information

Agilent instruments, systems, and supplies are used throughout the food production chain, including incoming inspection, new product development, quality control, quality assurance and packaging. To learn more about solutions for these applications, please see the Foods & Flavors section of our Web site. For additional information about these and other Agilent life sciences products and resources, please visit the Life Sciences/Chemical Analysis homepage.