Guess who is behind flavors in your food products?

CAIRO – 10 November 2017: Whether it is to give a natural ingredient its taste back after it lost it in processing or to give a product a fantasy taste, which consists of tens of ingredients, a CNN report revealed that all food and beverage products are ultimately flavored.

Flavor houses are types of laboratories where chemists recreate flavors chemically, whether through natural or unnatural ingredients to create natural and artificial flavors. The biggest flavor house in the world is Givaudan, which happens to supply the taste of around 20 percent of the global market's products, according to industry analysts Leffingwell & Associates and CNN.

The main reason most products need flavoring is that these products go through massive processing and end up losing taste. Also another reason is that some ingredients are simply not produced to meet the global need; the report gives the example of bona fide vanilla bean, which is even though massively produced naturally, it is still not enough to cover public demand, that is when flavor houses work to supply the world with the rest of the ingredient.

While most flavors are created to taste like the natural ones, flavor houses are also capable of creating "fantasy flavors" which are a number of flavors combined, such as the flavor of mojito which consists of lime, mint, rum and sugar.

Some flavors such as black pepper include one ingredient, some other flavors might include tens of ingredients and all flavor houses are bound by confidentiality agreements not to reveal the secret ingredients of their flavors so as to avoid being copied by competitors. However, all approved flavoring ingredients are marked as GRAS or Generally Recognized As Safe by specialized experts.