It is no secret that a lot of the candy eaten on Halloween is artificially flavored. If you take a look at the ingredients listed on many popular candies, after sugar or high fructose corn syrup you will probably see “natural and artificial flavors” or even just “artificial flavors.” What does that mean?
Artificial flavors are generally defined as chemical mixtures that mimic a natural flavor in some way. There are four common flavors that your tongue can sense: sweet, salty, sour, bitter. Artificial flavoring tries to imitate those specific sensations with hundreds of chemicals known to be flavoring agents. A professional flavorist has the job of mixing those chemicals together to produce familiar, but artificial, tastes.
The job of a flavorist involves identifying the chemical compounds in natural ingredients to create a flavor profile using one or more synthetic ingredients that align with the known chemical composition. For example, strawberries have the chemical compound indole-3-acetic acid, which makes up much of its taste. Flavorists replicate this flavor by isolating a combination of ethyl, amyl, and methyl groups to create that specific “strawberry” taste. For a complete list of the ingredients in artificial strawberry flavor, click here.
As a result, after reaching into a bag of Skittles, Starbursts, or Sour Patch Kids, you might taste fruity flavors, but they come from a carefully-designed mixture of chemicals. The variety of these mixtures is nearly endless.
This vast number of chemical recipes used to create Halloween treats contributes to the wide variety of candies available on the market, all designed to appeal as strongly as possible to our sense of taste. As you’re enjoying your confectionery delights this Halloween, you won’t have to wonder what makes them taste impossibly good.
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