Know your Food Flavouring Substances

Did you know that you not only taste the flavour but also smell it?

The aroma of the food along with the taste determines the flavour perceived. The sense of taste is responsible to help you distinguish between sweet, sour, bitter or salty whereas smell enables you to perceive the complex flavours of the food. A food's flavor can be easily altered by changing its aroma while keeping its taste similar. So now you know why the food does not taste as good when you have a blocked nose.

Food manufacturers add flavouring substances either to regain the flavour lost during processing (e.g. juices) or to give desired flavour to food products such as biscuits.

You will find one of the following types of flavouring substance specified on the food product labels.

▪   Natural flavoring substances: These substances are obtained from a natural source, by physical, microbiological or enzymatic processes. For Example, the natural strawberry flavouring substance could be produced by processing strawberries.

▪   Nature-identical flavoring substances: Nature-identical substances are the flavoring substances that are created through a chemical processes in a laboratory but their chemical structures are identical to the substances present in natural products. So for example natural and nature-identical apple flavouring substances are chemically identical and hence our bodies cannot distinguish between the two.

▪   Artificial flavoring substances: These substances can have a flavour i.e. taste and aroma similar to a food found in nature but chemically are very different. Sometimes the flavour from artificially flavouring substance is more concentrated than the  natural flavouring substances.

Flavour enhancers are added to food, to amplify the existing taste and/or odour of a foodstuff, and/or to increase the overall perception of all flavour characteristics, and/or to increase a single flavour perception so significantly that it is out of balance relative to the modification of the other flavour characteristics. Flavour enhancer by itself do not add any flavour either as taste or aroma to the food but enhance the flavour of one or more of the ingredients of the food product.