FLAVORS

Flavors are key to enjoying food and beverages, whether naturally occurring or added as ingredients. Flavor ingredients take many forms including liquids, solids and gases. We commonly think of flavors as tasted by the tongue, but most of what we sense as flavor is actually aroma, a stimulation of our olfactory receptors in the nasal cavity. The taste buds on the tongue play a role in sensing sweet, sour, salt and bitter sensations, but flavors and aromas are much more complex. Color, temperature and texture also play roles in flavor perception.

Natural flavors occur naturally in foods or are produced during normal food preparation processes such as cooking. Artificial flavors are flavoring substances extracted from natural sources or created in the laboratory, and added to enhance flavor. They may be “nature identical” or completely original.

Most flavor ingredients used by the food industry are either dry powders or liquids including concentrates, extracts, and essences, all typically mixed with another liquid. Concentrates usually have water removed by filtration or evaporation, leaving a more viscous “concentrated” juice. Extract implies a purification of a desirable component of the juice, by removing some material such as sugars, starch, and fiber. Essences are the volatile aromas that may evaporate during juice concentration, but can be captured and added back to enhance a flavor profile.

Flavor ingredients can be water soluble, but are often oils that don’t mix with water and processors need to create a stable suspension in water by emulsifying or dissolving the ingredient in an organic solvent like alcohol or propylene glycol. Flavor oils in water emulsions are very common in liquid flavor products as well as a necessary step in spray-dried powders.

Producing a stable emulsion is not easy. Variables include ingredient density, desired oil droplet size, and the stabilizing system. The oil phase must be mixed with the immiscible water phase using high shear to form the correct droplet diameter. The density may need to be adjusted using other ingredients and a gum may be added to stabilize the droplets by coating them and increasing the water phase viscosity. Poor quality emulsions break down forming neck rings, sediment and creaming in finished food products.

Admix provides solutions to these mixing challenges. Our high shear Rotosolver top entry mixer is widely used to disperse mixtures for direct application or prior to homogenization for spray drying. The Fastfeed inline powder induction system introduces and disperses powders or flavor oil quickly, efficiently, and ergonomically.

Rotosolver, Rotostat and Dynashear produce flavor emulsions down to 3-5 microns. The Boston Shearmill will produce emulsions down to 0.5 microns.

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