Inside the Food Labs

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Another food category in which high-octane flavors can be everything is Latino cuisine. Americans raised on the pasty fare of gentrified Mexican restaurants may know little about the fine and fiery food available south of the Rio Grande, but flavorists do particularly when it comes to chile peppers. The spiciness in food is measured in Scoville units. A typical fast-food taco may reach 150 on the Scoville scale. IFF flavorists have developed chile essences that climb to 1 million. One drop, the scientists boast, can heat a giant pot perfect when you're marketing to an audience unafraid of taste.

Sweet drinks are also big with Latino consumers, and Nestle is planning to hit that market hard, beginning with its Kerns line of aguas frescas fruity or milky drinks often made from scratch in Hispanic homes. There are dozens of varieties of aguas frescas, and before Nestle technicians could begin to select three or four to sell ready made, they knew they had to understand their audience better. Company representatives began touring tacquerias around Los Angeles, sampling everything from basic beans and slaw to more complicated carnitas and carnes asadas. More important, they made it a point to drink whatever beverages the customers were ordering.

Ultimately, Nestle settled on three aguas frescas: a simple strawberry, a more complicated tamarind drink (made from a tart, vanilla-bean-like pod) and an exceedingly complex horchata, made from rice, cinnamon and other spices. "Everyone has their own family recipe for horchata," says food developer Vida Leong. "We mixed and blended for weeks until we matched what we considered the gold standard." So far, their efforts are paying off. The three aguas frescas have been doing well in California and Arizona and will roll out around the country in the months to come.

Flavor Without the Fat
The problem with all these new food choices is that sometimes enough can be way, way too much. The obesity problem in the U.S. has reached epidemic proportions, with 65% of the population considered overweight or obese. The pressure is increasing on restaurants and manufacturers to get at least some of the fat out of food. The difficulty, of course, is that fat is often where flavor lives.

Researchers at IFF and other flavor companies have ways to get around that. A critical element in fatty foods is mouth feel the creamy, palate-coating character of, say, thick pudding or cheesy lasagna. Scientists can mimic that feel with substances such as starches, polysaccharides or lactones (a natural product of fermentation). These lower-cal alternatives can give food a higher-cal feel. "When you create the impression of fat," says Miller, "you also enhance flavor."

Other tricks are simpler. Stouffer's, for example, has found that crushed tomatoes in its Lean Cuisine line go a long way toward enlivening foods stripped of their fattier ingredients. "The tomatoes have more body and a riper taste," says Kathy Klingensmith, who works in R. and D.

Also important is avoiding dryness. Fatty food is usually moist, and for consumers accustomed to gooey cookies and premium ice cream, something that's both dry and fat-free might as well be tree bark. Developers thus fortify foods with substances known as humectants glycerin, sucrose or similar ingredients that hold moisture.

Certainly not everybody needs or wants to know about the humectants in snacks. Scientific reductionism is fine in astronomy or physics, but it's another thing entirely when your dinner is involved. There are few things more intimate than the preparation of food an ancient, imprecise craft built on pinches and dashes and tasting things at the stove. What are old-style cooks to do when this quiet craft is elbowed aside by an industry in which flavor concentrations are measured in parts per billion and companies like IFF can sell, without irony, a product called Fleximint, "a tool kit for mint work"?

Traditionalists may abhor all this, but the food scientists are only doing what we ask them to do: respond to the needs of 280 million people all trying to eat at once and do so in the most enjoyable, affordable and nutritious way possible. It's the industry's job to fill the national plate; it's our job to decide which parts of that vast meal we want to eat.