For consumers, savoriness often is all about that familiar and pleasing salty taste. This includes both the direct taste of saltiness and the indirect role salt performs in masking any bitter, metallic or astringent notes. With salt, taste intensity increases within a few hundred milliseconds and then rapidly drops off—making it a highly distinguishable and uniquely precise flavor profile. This uniqueness, combined with the multi-purpose functionality, is at the core of why sodium reduction can be such a significant formulation challenge.
The go-to sodium-reduction strategy is typically to use alternative chloride salts instead of sodium chloride (NaCl). It turns out the chloride anion can often be relatively more important functionally than the sodium cation, which is why other chloride salts are often looked to as replacers.