Going to a flavour supplier when your product has a taste problem is completely logical. You've identified the issue, you've found the people with the expertise, and you send off your brief with a real sense that you're finally getting somewhere.

So why do so many food and drink brands find themselves still cycling through samples months later, still not quite landing where they need to be?

I know how frustrating that is. And I want to say something I really mean: if this has happened to you, the problem is almost never as big as it feels in that moment. Most of the time, the reason things stall is quite specific. And once you understand it, you can actually fix it.

If you're not sure what that specific thing might be for your product, the Flavour MOT is a free starting point to work out exactly what is getting in the way.

The logic makes sense, even when the result doesn't

If you have ever gone straight to a flavour supplier when your product wasn't quite tasting right, that is a completely understandable thing to do. You have a taste problem, you need flavour expertise, so you go to the flavour experts. Most food and drink brands do exactly the same.

It doesn't mean something has gone wrong in your thinking. But it does mean something important tends to get skipped.

What a flavour supplier actually does

To be honest, I think it really helps to understand how a flavour supplier actually operates, because a lot of founders go in with expectations that are slightly different from how things work in practice. I say this because I was trained inside a flavour company, and I have seen this from both sides.

When you contact a supplier and give them a brief, what you typically get back are off-the-shelf flavours. These are flavours that have already been developed by flavourists, often for other projects or other applications, and the suppliers have them ready to go in their library as the closest existing match to what you have described. So they are not built specifically around your product, your base, or your target consumer.

Bespoke flavour development does exist, but it tends to be more accessible to larger customers and usually comes with higher minimum order quantities or volume commitments. For smaller or earlier-stage brands, the off-the-shelf route is generally the more practical option, and that is completely fine.

And here's what I think is really important to understand: a supplier can taste through options with you and share their technical knowledge, but they do not have the capacity to deep dive into your target consumer, your brand positioning, and how your functional ingredients are actually behaving in your formulation. That strategic work is simply not what they are set up to do. So it means you need to know exactly what to bring to the table before the conversation even starts.

When there is no strategy, even good suppliers get stuck

A brand I worked with, Vivo Life, is a really good example of what this looks like in practice. They are a plant-based nutrition brand, and before we started working together on their Perform range, they had been going back and forth with their flavour supplier through a huge number of samples. They still couldn't quite find the right flavour direction, and both parties were frustrated. 

They had always focused on functionality and clean label, which was exactly right for where the market was. But they hadn't yet built a structured flavour strategy around their target consumer and their base. So their supplier was doing their very best, but without that clarity, each round kept going without a clear direction to land on.

Once we put that foundation in place, things moved much more efficiently. They relaunched their Perform range at the end of 2025 with really positive consumer feedback. And it's such a good reminder that when the foundations are right, things come together.

If any of that sounds familiar, a Flavour MOT can help you work out what the foundation is missing before you go back to your supplier.

Taste is subjective until you give it structure

Here's something I find really helpful to share with founders. Taste is subjective until you give it structure. When your team tastes samples without a shared language or a clear framework, every session tends to end with something like "I think I prefer this one" or "this one feels a bit off." That kind of feedback is genuinely hard to act on, for you and for your supplier.

It's not because your team doesn't have a good palate. It's because tasting without the right framework is a bit like trying to describe a colour without knowing its name. The more clarity you have around what your target consumer already loves, the better every single flavour decision becomes.

Fix your base before you think about flavour

This is one of the most important things I have learned from working with functional and clean-label brands, and it's worth saying clearly. Fix your base before you even think about flavour.

Most food and drink brands in this space are working with genuinely challenging ingredients, whether that's plant proteins, adaptogens, or marine collagen. And these ingredients bring with them some really difficult sensory notes: bitter, metallic, earthy, astringent. If you have ever launched a product and found it tastes a bit like a health food shop, you know exactly what I mean.

The instinct is to reach straight for flavour. Find a chocolate, a vanilla, a strawberry that can cover everything up. But if you do that before you have addressed the underlying issues in your base, the flavour has far too much work to do. You can end up with a product that smells like strawberry but still carries that earthy, bitter taste underneath, and that is a really difficult place to recover from.

So what I do with every brand I work with is address the base first, one problem at a time. Is the main issue bitterness? That is where the work starts. Is it earthiness? Astringency? You work through each one systematically before you even begin thinking about which flavour profile you want.

The masking balancing act

And there is something else worth understanding here. When you use a masker flavouring, for example a plant-based protein masker to reduce earthy or green notes, that masker will also affect the flavour you layer on top. So if you add a chocolate flavour after using a protein masker, you will also mask some of those chocolatey notes.

You have to find the right balance between reducing the undesirable notes and still letting the top flavour come through clearly. Some flavours work really well as masking agents in their own right, vanilla, mint, and burnt sugar being good examples. But if you are using vanilla to mask, that is its job at this stage of your formulation. You cannot also use it as a flavour direction yet. It is a masking tool first.

The right order of things changes everything

So once the masking work has been done and your base is in a place where those challenging notes are minimised as much as possible, that is when you open up the full conversation about flavour direction. And that is also when your flavour supplier becomes one of the most powerful tools you have.

Your flavour supplier is not the solution to your taste problem. Your flavour strategy is. And once that is in place, your supplier can do exactly what they are brilliant at: helping you find the right flavour to bring that strategy to life.

If you want to work out what is actually holding your product back before your next supplier conversation, the Flavour MOT is a free place to start.