What are Natural and Synthetic Flavours?

Commercial food and drink products contain an array of ingredients. The building blocks of a beverage include natural and artificial flavors. Often among the smallest components of a product, these flavor compounds are not to be overlooked—after all, it’s flavor that consumers crave!

Flavor additives are responsible for much of a drink’s sensory profile. They provide consumers the opportunity to enjoy unique flavors they may not otherwise be able to experience in their original form, and they help beverage companies deliver consistent, high-quality experiences with their products.

Flavour is a sensory phenomenon which is a combination of the sensations of taste, odour or aroma, heat and cold, and texture or “mouthfeel”. The appearance of food is important, but it is the flavor that ultimately determines its quality and acceptability. Flavor is how we perceive food and other substances based on a combination of senses, which include taste, smell, and touch.

 The tongue is covered in taste receptors that identify the five basic tastes: salty, sour, bitter, sweet, and umami. Taste and the other senses play an important role in our enjoyment and digestion of food. The smell, sight and taste of food – especially delicious food – stimulate the production of digestive ‘juices’ (such as saliva in the mouth and HCl in the stomach) and prepare the body to receive food.

When food is processed, it loses its natural flavor, and when it sits on a store shelf for weeks, natural chemicals in food begin to deteriorate, reducing their shelf life and affecting the way they taste. That’s where the flavor industry comes in. Flavourings are ingredients that are added to foods in very small amounts, either to give a specific flavour to a product, such as a soft drink, boiled sweet or yoghurt, or to enhance or replace flavour lost during food processing. Flavourings can either be produced from extracting the aromatic compounds from foods, or by manufacturing new compounds to excite our taste buds

.Flavouring agents are key food additives with hundreds of varieties like fruit, nut, seafood, spice blends, vegetables and wine which are natural flavouring agents. Besides natural flavours there are chemical flavours that imitate natural flavours. Some examples of chemical flavouring agents are alcohols that have a bitter and medicinal taste, esters are fruity, ketones and pyrazines provide flavours to caramel, phenolics have a smokey flavour and terpenoids have citrus or pine flavour.  Natural flavouring materials such as spices, essential oils and fruit juices have been used for long in food preparations but as their supply has not kept up with the demand, with a consequent rise in their cost, natural flavouring agents have been largely substituted by synthetic ones. Thousands of these synthetic compounds are now being used as food additives

According to Codex Alimentarius “flavourings or flavouring substances are added to food to impart aroma or taste. Like other food additives their use should not present an unacceptable risk to human health and should not mislead consumers. The quantity added to foods should be at the lowest level necessary to achieve the intended flavouring effect. Flavours and flavouring substances should also be of appropriate food grade quality; and be prepared and handled in the same way as a food ingredient.”

Flavours are normally classified into three categories natural flavouring and artificial flavourings and nature-identical flavourings.

Natural flavouring substances are extracted from plants, herbs and spices, animals, or microbial fermentations. Essential oils and oleoresins that are created by solvent extract with the solvent removed, herbs, spices and sweetness are all natural flavourings. Natural flavourings can be either used in their natural form or processed form for human consumption and they cannot contain any nature-identical or artificial flavouring substances.

The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations defines natural flavourings as “the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or any other edible portions of a plant, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose primary function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional.”

Artificial flavouring agents are chemically similar to natural flavourings but are more easily available and less expensive. However, one drawback is that they may not be an exact copy of the natural flavourings, they are imitating natural flavour compounds like for example amyl acetate that is used as banana flavouring or ethyl butyrate which is used as pineapple flavouring.

                                         

Nature-identical flavouring agents are the flavouring substances that are obtained by synthesis or are isolated through chemical processes. There chemical make-up of artificial flavourings is identical to their natural counterparts. These flavouring agents cannot contain any artificial flavouring substances.

Besides this category there are also natural flavour enhancers like monosodium glutamate (MSG) which bring out the flavours of foods. They have a taste that is different and cannot be called any of the known flavours like sweet, sour, salty or bitter. In fact the taste of MSG is called ‘umami’ and is known as the fifth taste also found in high protein foods like meat. Monosodium glutamate was once derived from seaweed but now it is manufactured commercially by the fermentation of starch, molasses, or sugar.

Natural vs. Artificial Flavours (Conclusion)

To sum up, we can say that Natural flavours are essential oils or compounds extracted from spices, fruits, vegetables, bark, buds, leaves, meat, seafood, poultry, and dairy products, etc.

On the other hand, artificial flavours are simply chemical synthetic mixtures of flavours that taste and smell like natural flavours. The significant role of both the natural flavour and artificial flavour is to add flavouring to the food rather than nutrition. 

Both artificial and natural flavors contain chemicals. The distinction between natural and artificial flavorings is the source of chemicals. Natural flavors are created from anything that can be eaten (i.e animals and vegetables), even if those edible things are processed in the lab to create flavorings.

Artificial flavors come from anything that is inedible (i.e petroleum) that is processed to create chemicals of flavorings.