WHEN FLAVORS BECOME FUNCTIONAL: PART II
Our partner Aromatech France has been working on sweet enhancer flavors for the past five years. Each newly created flavor has its positive effect on the final product, however, due to dynamic requirements of the customers and the government, the FSL technical team continuously worked on this flavor category to appropriately meet these requirements and taste expectations of our customers.
Sweet Enhancer Type Flavor 7.96080 is the latest creation of Aromatech France which has a huge potential to substitute sugar in drinks with several other benefits. It contains monk fruit extract which is now a popular ingredient to substitute sugar. Monk fruit is a sub-tropical melon fruit that has originated from Southeast China. The monk fruit extract is 150 – 200 times sweeter than sugar, non-caloric, known to be an antioxidant and unlike stevia, it has no bitter after-taste. Due to its flexible properties, it could also give room to other product enhancements such as complex carbohydrates, fibers and whole grains.
Sweet Enhancer Type Flavor 7.96080 was created to substitute 25% of sugar in drinks at a dosage of 0.30%. Its effect on the organoleptic profile of a drink has been evaluated by 15 in-house panelists and found to be acceptable in sweetness and overall acceptability.
The evaluation was done by applying Sweet Enhancer Flavor 7.96080 in mixed berries flavored drinks and was compared with other mixed berries flavored drinks containing flavoring substance with stevia as a main source of sweetness. These two drinks where then compared with a mixed berries drink containing regular sugar content of 12°Bx to determine which between the two has a potential to have almost the same level of sweetness as conceived by panelists or human senses. Refer to table 1 for the recipe of the drinks subjected to sensory evaluation.
