A16 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5 , 2019
glossy brioche buns with deli-
cate Parmesan crisps. Wright
tastes, appraising. How is the
chew? Is it meaty enough?Working as a flavorist
Wright grew up east of Lon-
don and studied chemistry at
King’s College London. She
worked in Europe for years,
moved to New Jersey and com-
muted back and forth to South
America to set up flavor labs.
Salaries for flavorists vary wide-
ly, she says, from $50,000 to
$500,000. Flavorist is a mentor-
ing profession, with trainees
spending years as underlings in
places such as ADM’s Academy
of Future Flavorists program. It
takes seven to 10 years to
achieve flavorist status, and
20 to be a senior flavorist,
Wright says.
“Learning the materials takes
three to four years. Like being a
pianist, you have to practice. A
trainee may do 20 to 30 versions
of a flavor,” she says.
Flavorists work with beakers
and magnetic stir bars. Theyal, bloody note and seeking
appealing top notes that mimic
seared sirloin. They go beyond
sweetness, sourness, saltiness,
bitterness and umami, reaching
for a lesser-known “sixth taste”
sensation that the Japanese call
kokumi, which translates as
something like “heartiness” or
“mouthfulness.”
Then they take their thoughts
into the kitchen.
John Stephanian, ADM’s culi-
nary director, went to culinary
school but considers himself a
culinologist, where the culinary
arts and the science of food
meet. He’s plating the plant-
based burgers as the flavorists
arrive, deep ruddy patties with
charry grill marks, tucked ontoare industrially produced food
to which flavors and textures
and colors are added so it’s
attractive. What they do is cos-
metics.”
Back at the lab, Wright and
the team nudge the burger for-
mula, trying to achieve the aro-
ma and flavors resulting from
the Maillard reaction, a chemi-
cal process between amino acids
and sugars as they reduce that
gives caramelizing meat its dis-
tinctive seared flavor.
They dry liquids in a spray
dryer, tiny droplets sent through
a hot chamber in a stainless-
steel box, the water driven off to
produce powders. They consider
the protein, the flavorings and
the binders, looking for a miner-at plant-based meats that taste
uncannily like the real thing,
but nutritionists warn that if
companies increasingly rely on
chemists to insert desirable fla-
vors into food, consumers might
temper their enthusiasm for this
new raft of better-living-
through-science processed
foods.
With their pea protein iso-
lates, their gum arabic and yeast
extracts, these new foods are the
opposite of whole foods, the
obverse of transparent sourcing.
Some nutritionists and food in-
dustry leaders are wondering
whether the food system is be-
ing led astray by foods that need
their flavor and appeal inserted
industrially.
“It doesn’t resemble the foods
from which it came; it has a vast
number of ingredients. It fully
meets the definition of ultra-
processed food,” says Marion
Nestle, author and nutrition
professor at New York Universi-
ty, about these new plant-based
meats. “Are flavorists complicit?
They always have been. Thesework with gas chromatography
mass spectrometry instruments
that separate chemical mixtures
and identify the components at
a molecular level. They paint
their pictures with essential
oils, resinoids, concretes and
absolutes, the building blocks of
fragrance and flavor. But mostly,
they use their noses and skills of
prognostication.
Designing an average of
300 new products a year, fla-
vorists have tens of millions of
dollars riding on their senses
and gut instincts about the next
big thing in the food industry.
“There are so many influenc-
es from all over the world. If
you’re going to hang your hat on
a flavor for next year, you may be
wrong,” Wright says.
It’s about reverse engineer-
ing, listening to clients’ visions
while tracking trends and pre-
dicting consumer fetishes and
preoccupations.
“Consumers are driving
trends. Trends only used to
come from high-end restau-
rants. Now, a lot of trends are
coming from street foods,” she
says. “The consumer has
changed. They’re saying, ‘I’m
not going to eat that, and I have
a say.’ ”
She points to smaller food
companies such as Beyond Meat
and Impossible Foods, which
have pushed food giants such as
Cargill, Tyson Foods, Kellogg
and Smithfield Foods into a
headlong race to produce signa-
ture plant-based meats.
Before the day is over, Wright
checks in with a flavorist work-
ing on an energy bar flavored
with salted caramel, then with a
team in the mint lab working on
a gum that both cools and
tingles. She tastes a nitro coffee,
deciding whether it should be
flavored with Madagascar or
Ugandan vanilla — the former
classic and beany, the latter
sweeter with a hint of milk
chocolate.
And about that burger. Non-
disclosure agreements prevent
her from naming the company
behind this plant-based patty,
but the meeting is a success, the
company’s team staying for two
days to hash out the details.
“They liked aspects of it, and
they also wanted some changes
in the fat delivery. They wanted
a bit more of that bloody, miner-
ally note and more of that
seared taste, as well as that
melty quality you get with ani-
mal fat,” Wright says.
“A few years ago, they didn’t
have to taste so fantastic, but
now we can really replicate a
meat product without meat,”
she says.
Clients often provide nutri-
tional and price guidelines, with
the ADM team working within
constraints such as calorie
counts or projected retail cost.
Once the formulation has been
approved, the client gets the
recipe, frequently having it pro-
duced and packaged by a co-
manufacturing facility. Wright
and her group don’t produce the
finished, packaged product.
They invent the formula.
With food technology and the
culinary zeitgeist moving so
swiftly, predicting what will res-
onate with consumers is tricky
— even with Wright’s expanding
toolbox of ingredients and food
technologies.
“It’s a huge area of invest-
ment,” Wright says. “If it doesn’t
taste delicious, people are not
going to buy it.”
[email protected]growth of plant-based protein
and meat alternatives will in-
crease from $4.6 billion in 2018
to $85 billion by 2030.
Despite its swift ascent,
plant-based meat is the antithe-
sis of recent trends such as local
and farm-to-table dining, repre-
senting an embrace of highly
processed foods made palatable
in a laboratory by technicians
such as Wright.
“These are great proteins
from a nutritional perspective,
but plant-based presents some
challenges with tastes that can
be unpleasant,” Wright says.
First, there is the masking of
the vegetal “green” notes in pea
protein and the “beany” notes in
soy, often by adding other ingre-
dients and chemicals.
“There isn’t one magic bullet,
not one molecule or extract. It
tends to be common pantry
items like salt, spices, molasses,
honey,” Wright says. Vanilla ex-
tract is often used for masking
because it is known for how it
binds to a protein, rendering its
own distinctive taste undetect-
able.
“It sacrifices itself,” she says.
She describes vegetal notes
that are more about aromatics.
The goal is not to remove these
aromas, but to prevent them
from being perceived.
“Smell and taste are closely
linked in the appreciation of
flavor but are independently
triggered,” she says. “Taste is
composed of the taste sensa-
tions perceived in the mouth
and odor compounds perceived
by the receptors in the nose
linked to the olfactory lobe.”
Then comes the insertion of
the mineral, musky, charry, “um-
ami” flavors that we associate
with meat.
Wright huddles with fellow
flavorist Ken Kraut, who works
only on the savory side. They
swirl little plastic cups of clear
liquid, sniffing and tasting. Too
yeasty, they say. They want a
little less soy and a bit more
umami — that elusive, savory
monosodium glutamate flavor.
Mushrooms provide that, as
does Japanese green tea. Meat’s
mineralized note can be mim-
icked by concentrated extracts
of broccoli and spinach.
They’ve got a deadline. A big
client is coming in the following
week to test blended veggie-
chicken meatballs, a plant-
based burger and a few other
proprietary products. Everyone
is launching a plant-based burg-
er these days, and as quickly as
possible.
“They want to do it in any-
where from six weeks to three
months — there’s an urgency, a
panic,” Wright says. “Usually, a
product is a year to 18 months to
complete.”
Wright says an ordinary prod-
uct — a snack bar or a protein
drink — might cost a client
$10,000 to $200,000 to have
ADM formulate a recipe, which
the company can then produce
in its own processing facilities.
Plant-based meat is different.
“This whole area is expensive
because it’s fairly high-tech,
with a lot of dollars involved in
research,” she says. “Something
like this, you’re talking
$100,000 to $1 million.”
There’s a lot of heavy lifting
that goes into making vegan sea
urchins out of soy and vegetable
oils or sausage links out of lupin
beans, a yellow and occasionally
bitter legume. The world is agog
FLAVORISTS FROM A
In the world of flavorists, the trick is to deliver on trends
PHOTOS BY KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST
Marie Wright, left, doesn’t like the taste of the first of four samples of a protein shake that Joy Merritt is working on at Archer
Daniels Midland on Oct. 3 in Cranbury, N.J. Taste and smell are crucial parts of the job of creating new and alternative flavors.LEFT: A plant-based burger, enhanced by flavors created at Archer Daniels Midland, is tested and tweaked before the client will come
to a tasting. RIGHT: Wright, vice president and chief global flavorist at ADM, creates a black truffle flavor to be used in an aioli.“It fully meets the definition of
ultra-processed food. Are flavorists complicit?
They always have been.”
Marion Nestle, author and nutrition professor at New York University(301) 778-
(703) 650-
(202) 919-