Flavorists working with the food industry, and to a lesser extent the personal care and nutraceutical fields, should be aware of a trend that is quietly, but increasingly, impacting their business—the commoditization of flavors. This business dynamic is due to a confluence of trends: unrelenting pressure for price reductions by industrial clients with the strategy of supplying flavor samples to alternate flavor houses for “matching” briefs. These briefs are supported by access to sophisticated analytical systems, such as time of flight mass spectrometers (TOF/MS), to analyze those flavors. These instruments give analytic chemists the capability to identify all key flavor components and this information can be supplied to the flavorists working on the matching brief. Here the flavorists’ intent is not necessarily the duplication of an exact flavor formula, but the development of an organoleptically equivalent flavor with reduced costs.
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