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If you're a food and drink brand and your product isn't performing the way it should, maybe the sales have slowed down or the review keep mentioning that the taste is not that great. I have created something to help you. It's called the Flavour Blueprint. It's a free guide that based on the process I use with my clients to fix their underperforming products.
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If you're tired of guessing and you want clarity before another batch, download your free flavour blueprint. If you want to create food or drink products that actually taste amazing, get the repeat purchases and see your sales go up.
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You need the flavour strategy. I'm Manon Galizzi, food scientist and flavour expert. And in this podcast I share what I've learned from helping food and drink brands create new products from scratch. Choose the right flavour direction or fix the flavours that are not working. Bonjour and welcome to another episode of my 30 day podcast challenge, how to work best with a Flavour House.
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This is what we're gonna talk about today. Let's start, by stepping back a little and just remind ourselves what is a Flavour house? Just in case you're someone that just put randomly this episode but you're not really sure what we are talking about.
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So Flavour house is a food manufacturer that sells natural flavourings, non natural flavourings, extracts, essences and oleoresin. Either they produce it on site or they buying from someone else. Why do we use flavouring?
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That is another question you may ask. Flavouring may have a bad, connotation, especially because I work a lot with clients that want to create food and drink product that are clean label, they are good for the environment and they are good for people.
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But trust me, flavourings are your friend because they compensate for process loss. So if your food and drink product use high shear, high temperature, harsh processes, you're gonna lose a lot of flavours through the process.
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You can even think about it when you bake lemon, drizzle cake at home, for example, how much of lemon juice and the lemon zest you have to put in your cake to be sure after baking it still tastes like lemon.
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The answer is a lot. So there's a lot of loss of flavours because aroma compound, wherever they come from, if they come from a flavoring or a powder, fruit juices, whatever they come from, all of these aroma compounds are most of the time very volatile.
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So any little thing make them completely vaporized through to the water contained in your food and drink product and they just go, they just gone out of Your product. So we use flavourings because they are very concentrated.
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So you would need much less compared to using actual product like lemon zest, fruit juice concentrate, fruit powder, etc. Etc. So it would disturb less the texture of your product. The second thing is consistency.
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We always want the food and drink product to taste always the same, don't we? So having these flavourings allows that to have always the same taste. And if you look at any product in your cupboard, you will see 99% of product that you have flavourings in them and it is for a good reason.
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Despite some bad press, there is no scientific evidence that show for example that non natural flavoring cause any health issue. We heard a lot about artificial colouring, but there is no evidence that even non artificial flavouring will create any health problems.
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So I'm not saying go and jump on non natural flavourings. What I'm saying the flavouring legislation is very, very, very highly controlled. Every year the flavouring legislation will update based on scientific data to change the maximum level or add a maximum level to flavour.
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So when I say as a food scientist and pro to clean label product, that flavourings are your friends, they are your friends. But let's come back to the question of this episode.
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When I worked in a flavour house, I worked with a lot of customers. And even when I went through the corporate world in the food industry, I saw exactly the same problem again and again. Basically any food and drink businesses I came across ask a flavour house for generic flavours with some iterations, but there is no indication of flavour profile.
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They let all of the responsibility to the flavour house to decide which flavour profile is best for my product. So for example, I received hundred of request, yes, can you send me a strawberry flavour please?
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Can you send me few vanilla flavours please? And just send me few flavour profiles, that's it. So when you work in the flavour house, you have hundreds or thousands of flavours that are created by the flavourist.
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Again, it can be natural flavourings, it can be extract essences, sometimes oleoresin. So my role was to go to the flavour library, smell some of the flavourings because I didn't have time to try them all. You can imagine, I don't have time to try hundred of strawberries.
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And the decision was mine to make, which is wrong. The decision about which flavour profile goes to your product is yours and should be yours. It should be based on a lot of data around what is the flavour profile of your product, a lot of research around your target consumers and what type of Flavour profile they would like.
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This is not the job of flavour house or contract manufacturer to take the decision for the you, you have to take this decision if you want your food and drink product to succeed. You have to take ownership of the flavour profile of your product and not let it to someone else.
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So this problem created a lot of back and forth. So I'm telling you from experience that this process doesn't work. I saw it first firsthand when I was working in the flavour house. I saw it firsthand when I was working at McVities and I saw it firsthand.
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Now I have my business working with my clients. It doesn't work. It always, always the same result is hundreds and back and forth until we finally give up or just take a flavour because we have to take a flavour because we can't delay the project any longer or completely cancel the product because we can't get the flavour right, right.
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So very easy solution to that. Like I said, take the ownership, do your research and select yourself the flavour profile that you think is suitable for your product. So my advice when you ask a flavour house for some flavours is to give them as much detail as possible.
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The flavouring legislation is very strict and change from country to country. So my advice is to create a spreadsheet with all information regarding your product. It can be nutritionals, it can be the ingredients or the main ingredients, the shelf life, the packaging, the country, where you're going to launch, when you plan to launch your product, when is your first production planned and of course anything around the different flavour profile you want to explore and having benchmark product.
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And this is what I do when I work with my clients on any of my three packages, whether it's create, choose or fix. So whenever you want to create a product from scratch and you need someone to do all of the product development for you, either you want help choosing the right flavour for your product or you need help fixing a product that is not performing on the market.
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And surprise, surprise, the main problem is how we taste and the flavours. As always, I hope this episode was helpful. You can find all of my tips around tasting flavours and product development in my newsletter. So don't forget to subscribe and I will see you tomorrow for another episode. Bye.
