The ingredients driving today’s on-trend products—such as better-for-you formulations and plant-based meat and dairy alternatives—share a need for flavor modification to make them more palatable to consumers. Simple additions to a formulation, such as caffeine or vitamin premixes, or more complex ingredient systems, such as hemp extracts and high-intensity sweeteners, can impart off or bitter flavor notes.
At the other end of the spectrum is an interest in amplifying a food’s natural desirable attributes, such as sweetness, richness, and complexity, any or all of which qualities can be lost during ingredient harvest, processing, and production. Such formulation challenges can be resolved by using flavor modifiers, a group of compounds that includes flavor maskers, bitter blockers, flavor potentiators, and flavor extenders.