The case of the Gros Michel suggests that we shouldn’t be so quick to label artificial flavours as “fake”. In many other flavourings, too, the chemistry is very similar to the genuine article – the reason they don’t taste the same is that they fail to reproduce other factors such as ripeness, age or flavours produced after cooking, for example.
There are exceptions to the rule. Vanillin is so dominant a compound in cured vanilla pods that simple vanilla flavourings synthesised in labs rather than extracted from organic matter are notoriously indistinguishable substitutes from “the real thing.” However, capturing the flavour of something like a whole, fresh and ripe strawberry in one compound is impossible.
That’s why today, there’s such a large market for moving beyond “one note” flavourings, says Danny Kite, senior flavourist at TasteTech in Bristol, UK. During the 20th Century, he explains, food and drink firms gradually realised that volatile compounds in foods lost during the storage of baked goods or the concentration of fruit juices for example could be captured and re-introduced to the product where possible.
“Over the years we’ve learned to trap those volatiles before they escape, condense them and then you have something that some people call an essence, some people call an aroma, but generally speaking you have a liquid which has a taste of the fruit,” he says.
The tricky part is in making sure that those volatiles are released at exactly the right moment – when a consumer is ready to eat the product in question. TasteTech achieve this through a special technology known as “encapsulation”, in which compounds are encased within a matrix of vegetable fat. In cooked foods, for instance, this can protect them from the heat of an industrial oven, so that they’re only released later, inside the mouth.