Building Better Chocolates

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FEB 23- BUILDING BETTER CHOCOLATES EVENT RECAP

On Feb 23rd Sensapure Flavors hosted the “Building Better Chocolates” training event for Sensapure customers. Nutrition brands and manufactures sent their product development teams to Salt Lake City for the morning to learn about the art and science of creating better tasting chocolate products.

 

Why Chocolate? (Because it’s chocolate!)

 

For decades, the top two selling flavors of all protein supplements have been chocolate and vanilla. And let’s face it… chocolate is just more fun. From decadent fudge flavors, to bright and sharp dark chocolates, there are as many ways to fall in love with chocolate as there are different uses for the tasty flavor

Some key words people used to describe their favorite chocolates were smooth, creamy, rich, and complex. With this information we are able to see how much mouthfeel impacts overall chocolate preference. We can use this information when formulating to include creamers, fats, and gums to recreate a similar consumer experience.

It’s all about the growth of Plant Proteins

Years ago, a protein shake meant one thing. A whey protein, artificially sweetened, creamy milk chocolate shake. And getting the flavor system right on a product with plenty of Sucralose and milk solids wasn’t all that tough. After all, it was essentially a powdered chocolate milkshake. But times have changed. The desire to swap out artificial sweeteners for non-sugar natural alternatives, and ditch the whey protein for either plant based or collagen sources makes the development of great tasting protein supplements a little more difficult.

With year-over-year growth exceeding 30% for plant-based protein, meal replacements, and powdered supplements, the need to find ways to deliver great tasting chocolate products has never been higher.

We started with craft chocolate

The day began with a chocolate tasting presented by the same folks who host Chocolate Fest every year in Salt Lake City… Caputo’s European Fine Foods. Adri Pachelli, head of education and all things chocolate at Caputo’s lead the tasting with a review of cacao history, cultivation, processing, fermentation techniques, roasting secrets, milling specs, and of course a deep dive into how crushed cacao becomes craft chocolate.

 

The Science of Chocolate

With our new found vocabulary and educated chocolate taste buds, we let Doug Gledhill, one of Sensapure’s certified flavor chemists walk us through how we can mimic the various component parts of chocolate flavors found in nature using either natural or artificial ingredients.  “As a flavor chemist we need to know all about nature so we can recreate it in the lab,” said Gledhill. “Cocoa Powder alone can have over a thousand different naturally occurring chemicals.”

Let the Tasting Begin

The group of 30+ participants then tasted four different categories of products (whey / plant / collagen / natural sweeteners / gums and masking agents), evaluating each of the 12 products on sweetness levels, flavor attributes, and overall preference.
During this portion of the taste testing experience, Sensapure was able to demonstrate some key changes that lead to the overall improvement of the product. Using the Sensapure Tasting App, we were able to record the unbiased feedback in our audience’s preference on the samples before and after Sensapure solutions were applied.

2021 Flavor Trends – The year of social wellness

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2021 Flavor Trends – The year of social wellness

Consumers are shifting their focus towards their health and immunity now more than ever with social media leading the way.

With 2020 behind us, we have found new ways of connecting with our friends, family, and coworkers—and with that we have seen dramatic shifts in consumer behavior and the trends that follow. Immunity has stolen the spotlight as we continue to improve our overall health into 2021. We are seeing an increase in “better-for-you” alternatives, such as botanical cocktails and mocktails. As social media continues to lead the trends, we are coming together in new creative ways and creating meaningful collaborations. From Insta-worthy drinks to celebrity inspired flavors, innovation in flavors and new products are not slowing down any time soon.

1. Immunity Never Tasted Better

Drawing from traditional medicine and ayurvedic influences, the introduction of flavorful ingredients like turmeric, ginger, lemon and honey into new product formulations give them an extra immune boost. Elderberry and Vitamin C based products were in high demand and continue to win shelf space in our medicine cabinets.

2. Social Distanced Drinks with Pure Class

With so many hard seltzers and alcoholic spritzers now to choose from we are seeing classic flavors with an exotic twist. Think pear, grapefruit, mandarin, pomegranate, and cranberry with a botanical twist of ginger, lemongrass, hibiscus, elderflower, or lavender.

Many consumers are moving to a low alcohol or non-alcohol lifestyle, but lucky for them there are now some great zero-proof alternatives. From refreshing flavored sparkling waters (like lemon cucumber and lime mint) to craft artisan mocktails that use many of the same great tasting ingredients sans the alcohol.

3. BYOB: Be Your Own Barista 

As everyone has their stay-at-home lifestyle now down to a science, it makes it harder to meet up for a social cup of coffee. Self-quarantine has forced many people to create their favorite hot beverages at home and discovering their inner barista. With a huge increase in the variety of coffee products making their way to the shelves, some popular flavors trends include: Cinnamon Dolce, Hazelnut, Toffee, White Chocolate Mocha, Salted Caramel, Cinnamon Roll, Toasted Coconut, Vanilla Honeycomb.

4. Insta-worthy Drinks

Dalgona Coffee. The popularity of some pretty Insta-worthy drinks has surfaced, including Dalgona Coffee. Dalgona Coffee (AKA whipped coffee) gained its popularity via TikTok and quickly became the #1 googled recipe. The drink is just 3 ingredients in equal proportions, instant coffee powder, sugar (or granulated sugar substitute), and hot water. You can make the drink easily at home by whipping it until it becomes incredibly fluffy and then adding it to a glass of hot or cold milk of your choice. While Dalgona Coffee isn’t the most complex formulation, there is a big surge in leveling up your daily coffee experience with the addition of ingredients like protein, collagen, adaptogens, mushrooms, and more.

Butterfly Pea Flower Tea. Another Insta-worthy drink that has gained viral popularity is Butterfly Pea Flower Tea. Butterfly pea flower comes from Southeast Asia and is a brilliant blue color with a slightly sweet taste. This ingredient offers a color changing effect when exposed to citric acid. With the squeeze of a lime or lemon, the blue hue transforms to a vibrant violet color.

Butterfly Pea Flower is now making appearances in teas, cocktails, ice creams, baked goods and more to create a picture-perfect experience.  As this trend is making its way off the internet and into market, bold and exciting flavors such as: Plum, Lychee, Asian Pear, and Passionfruit are perfectly paired with this new sensation. 

5. Creating Famous Flavors 

Celebrity inspired flavors is the next level of collaboration taking place. Several companies are developing flavors around key celebrities and influencers. January 1st, 2021 Liquid I.V. launched their collaboration with international DJ, Kygo. Kygo’s flavor of choice was Pina Colada because he felt it matched the overall upbeat mood of his music. Liquid I.V. also collaborated with DJ Steve Aoki earlier in 2020 to launch his signature Strawberry Cake flavor.

As these 2021 social and flavor trends continue to evolve and create the need for Insta-innovation, Sensapure is here to help you bring them to life.  

Contact us today to get started!

Food and Beverage Industry Pandemic Marketing – Then and Now

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Food and Beverage Industry Pandemic Marketing – Then and Now

The world is incredibly different today than it was one year ago. It’s even different than it was one month ago. Things are changing rapidly, and in order to keep up with the rollercoaster of this Pandemic, Americans are consciously and unconsciously shrinking their worlds, pursuing closer, more tight-knit connections with one another. This also applies to their purchasing habits. Consumers feel the unexpectedness of our world and are tightening their spending and sticking more to products they know well and are familiar with.

So, in this new “normal”, how do food & beverage marketers manage their campaigns to keep companies successful and in-the-know, without seeming tone-deaf or out of the loop? It’s important to confront an impending global recession and be sensitive to consumer’s needs to tighten spending, but the bottom line is they need to still sell product. Looking at past recessions can offer insights into what marketers should expect in these unfortunate circumstances.

Consumers are prioritizing comfort- whether that is through community, mutual support, or through distanced interaction physical spaces where they live, or through their digital spaces. With so many things and activities shut down, people have turned to immediate communities and find solace in the nostalgic and familiar. While this pandemic has gone on longer than most people have foreseen, we’ve observed that people will continue to retreat to what they know. Knowing there is more close-knit value placed on daily life, businesses would do well to reconfigure their sales messaging to have a more direct-to-consumer, home-based feel.

Let’s examine how “comfort messaging” has been used in the past to help sell product. During WWI and WWII, Americans produced their own food and other goods as a patriotic act of unity through crises. “Victory Gardens” reduced the strain on the food system as commercial farms diverted resources to the troops, with 40% of U.S. produce grown at home. The Victory Garden movement boosted civic morale by giving every American a concrete action they could take to support overseas war efforts, quite literally from their own backyard.

Now, hobbies like cooking, gardening, and homesteading are becoming increasingly popular, as Americans have more time at home and deal with the restlessness of isolation. During large-scale shutdowns, many Americans have shifted their purchase habits to community-driven alternatives closer to home such as purchasing produce directly from farmers and supporting small local businesses. Just as in the past, this local, human-to-human focus indicates a desire to feel helpful and connected in a time of uncertainty, fear and loneliness.

So what does this mean for your food and beverage marketing? It’s time to think local and tell stories! Stories are one of the best ways to have that home-based connection. Share stories that show the positive human impact of your brand on their immediate community. Because of COVID, consumers are more willing to continue supporting brands if they see that the brand shows support for similar values. Now is the time to try creative, community-oriented solutions.

There’s no telling how long this Pandemic will last, and we don’t know for sure how the economy will adjust or if panic buying tendencies will continue to impact the F&B space. With all of that uncertainty, we need do adjust accordingly. If consumers cannot find a product in store — or especially now when they don’t want to risk venturing out to check — they order online. Now is the time to reach out to people where they’re seeing marketing. Getting your message of availability to the proper audiences will be key to brand building and awareness during this time of increased sensitivity and unknown.

 

COVID-19 Food Safety and Product Messaging

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COVID-19 Food Safety and Product Messaging

As companies begin to get back into a more regular momentum of retail, it’s important to look into what is required in order to meet food safety guidelines, and how these guidelines may affect your food products.

Coronaviruses are generally thought to be spread from person-to-person through respiratory droplets. Currently there is no evidence to support transmission of COVID-19 associated with food. It may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.

In general, because of the low survival rate of coronavirus on surfaces, there is likely very low risk of spread from food products or packaging.

This is great news for companies with food products. Knowing that there is low risk in COVID-19 transmission, production and distribution can increase to normal rates. The hurdle then becomes generating enough awareness of the safety and low-risk of disease transmission to the market. With production increases, it is important that your purchasing rate matches that. In a time of much fear and unknown, developing strong marketing messaging around your company’s product safety is important. It will help create trust and confidence in the product, and increase sales.

Let’s take a look at one company that is handling COVID Food Safety messaging particularly well- Good Foods Group. Danyel O’Connor, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Good Foods Group, Pleasant Prairie, Wis., said she doesn’t expect consumer buying habits to go back to what they once were, even after this Pandemic is over. Because of that, it’s important to pivot your marketing and messaging accordingly. “We’re going to see increased residual purchase habits or behavior in those areas because people are being forced to eat at home more frequently or they’re feeling less safe out in larger groups of people,” she said.

Good Foods Group makes produce-centric products such as avocado mash, guacamole, salads, dressings, juices and plant-based dips using high-pressure processing, or cold-pressure pasteurization. Traditional pasteurization uses high heat to remove bacteria but can also reduce the amount of some vitamins. Although their products have often been used for hosting and gathering with groups, they’ve realigned their marketing to match current consumer needs. O’Connor said, “People aren’t entertaining right now, except for your family at home, your small, close-knit immediate family, so our messaging has been, how do we help consumers get through this phase? It’s through simple recipe ideas, two or three ingredients, and sharing how other consumers are using the products at home.”

Using these same principles, you can pivot your messaging to highlight more simple, easy, quick, comforting ideas. It’s also important to look at what stresses your consumers are under, and use those stressors to adjust your messaging accordingly.

Knowing that COVID-19 is not likely to be transmitted through product manufacturing, it’s time to turn your messaging and marketing to help give consumers peace of mind, and options of ways that your product can help or comfort consumers during this time of unknown.

 

Chemicals- Smell, Taste, Structure

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Chemicals- Smell, Taste, Structure

There are Chemicals in everything we eat. All foods are made up of chemicals, whether they occur in nature or are made in a lab. That means everything we smell or taste is a response to chemicals.

Cinnamon is a spice that is used in both sweet and savory foods.

For example, the characteristic smell of cloves, comes from one chemical called eugenol. Cinnamon, which is just the dried inner-bark of specific trees, gets its aroma and flavor from the compound cinnamic aldehyde. In nature, vanillin comes from an orchid. The process of extracting this pure, natural chemical is extremely lengthy and expensive. The compound vanillin is responsible for the flavor and smell of vanilla. So scientists found a way to make a synthetic version of vanilla in a lab.

Both artificial and natural flavors contain chemicals

If both artificial and natural flavors contain chemicals, what’s the difference? The distinction between natural and artificial flavors is the source of chemicals. Natural flavors are created from anything that can be eaten.

According to the FDA, “Natural flavor is the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional.”

Artificial flavors come from anything that is inedible. For example, from petroleum that is processed to create chemicals of flavorings. For the FDA, the definition of an artificial flavor is any substance that does not meet the definition of a natural flavor

Artificial vs. Natural

Most times a chemical flavoring can be made from either natural or artificial sources — the resulting molecule is the same, but the route to making is different. So which are “safer” or “better” for you, artificial or natural flavors? The answer is probably not what you think.

Since the chemicals for natural flavors are derived from organic sources, they can carry a higher risk of contamination. It’s not that it is slowing down interest in natural flavors, it’s just the opposite. Demand for natural flavors in expected to continue to grow.

So if the demand for natural flavors is increasing, why use artificial flavors at all? Synthetic chemicals that make up artificial flavors generally cost less to produce than finding and extracting the chemicals from natural sources.

Contact our flavor chemists to get started with your flavor today.

Download a copy of our chemical presentation here

Flavor Descriptors: Facts About Flavors

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Flavor Descriptors: Facts About Flavors

Ever wonder what really makes up flavors and smell? Not all molecules are detectable through olfaction, but some odorous molecules create a chemical stimulus in the brain that we called “smell.” How, you ask? These specific molecules bind to receptor proteins extended from cilia, initiating an electric signal to the brain.

An aroma is caused by one or more volatilized (changing into a gas state) chemical compounds, generally at a very low concentration, that humans or other animals perceive by the sense of olfaction. Aromas can be pleasant and unpleasant.

Smell vs. Taste

Approximately 80% of what we perceive as taste is in fact, due to our sense of smell. This occurs with both nasal (through the nose) and retro-nasal (through the back of the throat) olfaction or smell.

Taste is the sensation produced when a substance in the mouth reacts with our taste receptor cells located on our taste buds in the mouth, mostly on the tongue. A few known taste sensations: Bitter, Sweet, Salty, Acid (Sour), Umami (Savory) and possibly Kokumi (Hearty/Starchy).

Flavor

We could define flavor as the blend of taste and smell sensations induced by a substance in the mouth. Taste and Smell vary depending on genetic makeup, gender, health, training, environmental factors and fatigue… BUT we don’t just sense flavor with our tongues. We also use touch, sight, sound, temperature, trigeminality to create the sensation in our brains that we call FLAVOR.

Supertasters

Most people are average tasters, but some people have many more taste buds than the rest of us. We call them Supertasters. It doesn’t mean they’re flavor connoisseurs or foodies (sorry about that), but it does mean they are extra sensitive to bitter tastes. Supertasters often report that foods like broccoli, cabbage, spinach, grapefruit and coffee taste very bitter.

Flavor Description and Evaluation

We can affect the flavor of food by how it is described. For example, protein bars might taste less desirable if they are described as soy protein and yogurt. And ice cream is perceived to be more flavorsome when described as full fat or high fat. In order to evaluate flavors, there’s a few suggestions that will help your accuracy. Evaluate the taste in a room free of smells, sounds and other sensory stimuli. Do not smoke, or drink coffee or alcohol prior to flavor tasting. Closing your eyes when tasting or smelling is helpful. Most importantly, if you need assistance with flavor description, consult Sensapure Flavor Descriptors for a description of the aroma profile that describe what you are tasting. We also recommend using the Sensapure Tasting Notes when evaluating flavors.

Flavor Fatigue

Particularly in the afternoons, as the day progresses, our sense of smell and taste can change, and most of the time is diminished. Avoid evaluating flavors late in the afternoon or after consecutive tastings. If you experience flavor fatigue, go outside to get a fresh breath of air. Eating unsalted soda crackers is also a very effective way of neutralizing aftertaste.

Contact our certified flavor chemists to get started finding the perfect description of your flavor today. We have just the right tools and terminology to add that wow factor to your flavor.

Download a copy of our flavor facts here

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