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Just as important, you've got to research your market. There is a reason there's hardly a corner of the planet where you can't find a can of Pringles, and that's because P&G has taken the time to learn what people in those corners like to eat. Got a hankering for squid-flavored Pringles? No, and you're not likely to develop one. But the company is considering just such a product for the Asian market, where squid is big in snacks. Curry-flavored Pringles are popular in Britain, paprika is a hit in Germany, and a perfectly ghastly sounding ketchup Pringles is a smash in Canada.
Another challenge is knowing how to manage your flavors once you've got them. Onion, for example, is a very volatile taste, which means it tends to evaporate as the chip ages. One answer is bigger onion flakes, but they fall off the chip. P&G thus had to determine the precise micron measurement of each bit of onion flavor and make sure it never varies. It's also critical to listen to how consumers react to the flavor, even if they're not making much sense. P&G routinely tests products with focus groups and has learned to translate their feedback.
"We'll have someone say, 'It's too spicy,'" Hsieh says. "And you're thinking, It's sour cream and onion. What are you talking about? You have to interpret because they're not flavor experts."
THE STRAWBERRY STATEMENT
Finally, as every food manufacturer knows, it's important to admit when you're licked. Sometimes a flavor simply defies duplication. At that point, it's time to call in the big guns from the big flavor houses. For a foodmaker looking for flavor help, the place to go is New Jersey. Commercial sailing vessels returning from the Far East used to unload their cargoes at the New York docks, and the spices and essential oils were sent to storage facilities in New Jersey. When technology made manufacture of synthetic flavors possible, the spice houses were in the best position to capitalize on the new science. Among the biggest of the flavor bigs is International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), which has one of its global labs in Dayton, N.J.
IFF's plain headquarters, housed in an unremarkable industrial building in an unremarkable industrial park, belies the extraordinary things the company can do. Specialists here can duplicate almost any imaginable flavor, using technologies like gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. The principle behind the science is deceptively simple.
A sample of a food item--a strawberry, for instance--is burned at high speed and high temperature in a gas chromatograph, reducing it to its constituent elements. The resulting vapor is then channeled to a spectrometer, through which the strawberry molecules stream in order of weight and size. Because the scientists know the measure of the molecules they ought to see in food, they can interpret peaks and valleys on a readout and identify all the components as well as their concentrations. Eliminate the ones that have nothing to do with flavor, and you're left with a perfect schematic of the stuff that makes the strawberry taste the way it does. Using the same chemicals, you can then rebuild that flavor in the lab. "It may take a month to do it right," says IFF senior flavorist Kevin Miller.