The Electronic Nose & Magnetic Tongue

We have compiled a few salt reduction related articles that have been published in the recent while. Salt reduction has been a very hot topic in Canada over the last few years, but Canadian guidelines have tended to be unclear & inconsistent. Regardless of the food industries obligations, reducing sodium in foods still remains a very healthy & popular product improvement move that food companies should be looking into. Canadian levels of salt in various food products are currently the highest, when compared to other G20 countries, thus it is clear that Canadian companies will eventually be asked to decrease total sodium levels at one point.

Removing total sodium from formulations, without affecting taste/flavour perception is not an easy task. This requires the Novotaste R&D team to work directly with your application so that the perfect salt replacer flavour system is customized for your application.

What do Saskatoon berries, seabuckthorn berries, and haskap berries all have in common? They are all produced by Canadian farmers! Raspberries, strawberries and blueberries get most of the attention in the summer. However, these other three berries deserve a second look.

The Saskatoon berry has been recognized for hundreds of years by Native Americans for its medicinal properties¹. Modern science has supported this practice by revealing the high antioxidant content of the berries. They are also a great source of manganese, magnesium, iron, calcium, potassium, copper and carotene¹. Despite its high nutritional benefits, the first Saskatoon berry orchard was planted less than 20 years ago and Saskatoon berries are only beginning to draw consumers’ interest².  Before that time, they were simply an abundant, wild berry. The berries have a deep purplish-blue hue and can be found throughout Canada’s prairies. Even its name, “Saskatoon,” evokes Canadian pride. They have a sweet, distinctive taste. It is said to have a flavour that is similar to a mix of blackberry, blueberry, and cherry with a hint of almond³. It is a mixture that will surprise you if you give them a try.

Novotaste appeared in an episode of  "Là est la question", which is a television show for children on TFO. This station has a variety of educational, cultural and community resources. It offers an attractive and interactive programming in French for children, adolescents and adults. The television program that was recorded at Novotaste is fun, but informative with a diverse range of topics. The whole purpose of this episode was to shed some light on the some general food related topics, such as: "Are there really bananas in banana flavoured popsicles?" The interview is conducted by one of the regular characters in the show which consist of a group of children.

Synesthesia is a neurologically based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway^1,2,3,4. One person out of every thousand has synaesthesia & surprisingly, there are people who can smell sounds, see smells or hear colors⁵.

The most common types of synesthesia are: Grapheme/Colour, Sound/Colour, Number Form, Personification & Lexical/Gustatory

I was originally looking forward to viewing the advertised 60 Minute segment on Flavourists, but was quite disappointed with the sensationalism involved. Its not uncommon for media to spin stories in such as way that it creates controversy & noise. Many people think that there is no such thing as "bad publicity", but sometimes, people will simply focus on the less important noise & totally ignore the substance.
The short segment basically involved a few interviews conducted with flavourists & their managers during a field visit to a citrus farm as well as in flavour creation laboratories. The aim of the story was to mainly shed some light on a flavourist's capabilities & how the creation of "addictive" flavours is responsible for obesity & bad eating habits. Flavourists were basically said to be "the hired guns of the food industry". The simple truth: the flavour industry is responsible in creating great tasting & sometimes un-healthy products, but far from being the source of the problem.

In recent years, new flavour combinations have been very trendy as can be seen in various products on the market. In some cases two popular flavours are either combined as one or inside individual layers or matrices. Various chewing gums, hard candies, bakery, beverage & other confectionery products currently have used this concept & even taken it to other levels. There is a skittles product that actually has been marketed as having flavour & colour combinations that are completely different then what the consumer is expecting. An example of this would be to have a lime flavoured layer (typically green) coloured with red. While it is possible to simply combine any two flavour profiles together, the net result will not necessarily be very good. Certain profiles are known to be compatible, others are waiting to be discovered & many are simply not meant to be.

As typical consumers, we probably smell/taste hundreds of different things in a given day. If you are working in the food industry (especially flavour houses), this number could easily reach a thousand! A flavourist will typically need to quantitatively & qualitatively identify individual chemicals in flavour formulations & different food applications. How does one quantify the strength of individual chemicals?

In 1914, Alexander Graham Bell noted:

This work was presented in a poster at the 9th Pangborn Sensory Science Symposium:

Comparison of the Preferred Attribute Elicitation method to conventional profiling for extracting consumers’ yogurt texture preferences A. Grygorczyk, I. Lesschaeve, M. Corredig, L. Duizer.

Attributes driving consumer preference are commonly derived from trained panel descriptive data coupled with consumer liking scores through techniques such as preference mapping. The method examined in this study, which we will refer to as Preferred Attribute Elicitation (PAE), derives this information solely from an untrained panel of consumers. The method has experienced some limited usage in industrial settings, however there exists a lack of information regarding how the results of this method compare to the descriptive analysis approach. The PAE method is carried out in a round-table setting and involves six steps: (1) product liking rating (individually), (2) attribute generation, (3) attribute grouping into categories, (4) line-scale generation, (5) importance ranking of attributes, (6) product attribute rating (individually).