*Content courtesy of IFF
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*Content courtesy of IFF
- 2025 sales: $10.9 billion (cross-category); $2.48 billion (Taste)
- Headquarters: New York
IFF
For IFF’s Taste business, it’s been a year of navigating a dynamic landscape, marked by industry-wide challenges such as price volatility and supply uncertainties, as well as opportunities like the GLP-1 revolution.
Despite these shifts, IFF’s Taste organization has remained steadfast, guided by two defining pillars: innovation and digital transformation to drive thought leadership.
Leaders from IFF Taste—Yuvraj Arora, president, IFF Taste; Adam Jańczuk, senior vice president, research, creation and design, Taste, IFF; Benjamin Mattei, vice president, intelligence and digital transformation, Taste, IFF; and Mimi Sherlock, vice president, global consumer intelligence, Taste, IFF—share how IFF is helping customers create products that deliver more joy in every sip and bite.
Elevating Health & Wellness Through Flavors
Q&A with Yuvraj Arora, President, Taste, IFF
Q: Can you give a brief overview of some key highlights of milestones the company has reached over the last 12 months?
This past year, we achieved several milestones that reflect both our ambition and our commitment to shaping the future of our industry:
Officially opened the Citrus Innovation Center in Florida, establishing a first-of-its-kind holistic citrus ecosystem. This center brings together advanced technologies, deep sensory expertise, and end-to-end fragrance and flavor capabilities that strengthen our leadership in citrus and accelerate our ability to cocreate with customers.
Significantly strengthened our digital and AI capabilities to drive innovation and growth across our entire value chain. AI is now being embedded end-to-end across our value chain, from identifying trends and weak signals, to generating product concepts, supporting flavor formulation and optimization, enabling innovation and manufacturing—fully leveraging IFF’s proprietary data at every step. We also opened our new IFF Kaleido space in Singapore—with more to come—a 360º multisensory experience that integrates video, scent, sound, and taste to power co-creation.
Strengthened our focus on the fast-growing GLP-1 landscape by leveraging GLP-1 driven consumer insights to lead the conversation. We hosted an industry webinar and published a groundbreaking report on how these medications are reshaping taste, appetite, and satiety, while showcasing nutrient-dense, protein and fiber-forward concepts. Helping our customers to design products for this growing consumer segment has been incredibly satisfying.
Our FlavorFit taste modulation technology continued to gain momentum, supporting manufacturers in optimizing taste while reducing sodium and sugar—at a time when consumer demand for better-for-you products is at an all-time high.
Together, these achievements reflect our commitment to strategic foresight and consumer-centered innovation, all with one goal in mind: helping our customers create products that deliver more joy in every sip and bite.
Q: How is your company adapting to global changes in dietary habits and flavor expectations?
Global shifts in dietary habits—driven most notably by the rapid expansion of the GLP-1 consumer segment—are redefining people’s experiences with food, and we’ve been adapting with intention and speed. GLP-1 users have evolving needs around portion size, sweetness, richness, and mouthfeel, which introduce new technical demands for flavor design. This requires deeper expertise in masking, texture, and taste.
Our strategy centers on empathy-led product development, grounded in an understanding of changing taste perceptions and the unique nutritional needs of GLP-1 consumers. Our goal is to help brands deliver joy, satisfaction, and better-for-you outcomes without compromise.
In parallel with the evolving weight-management landscape, we’re seeing a strong resurgence of interest in solutions for mood, immunity, cognitive function, and overall health and well-being, with food and beverage increasingly viewed as part of self-care. We also see biosciences as a pathway forward, supported by our combined capabilities through the IFF Health & Biosciences division.
By pairing deep consumer insight with advanced flavor science, we’re helping our customers lead in this new era of personalized, wellness-driven nutrition.
Innovating from Insight to Experience
Q&A with Adam Jańczuk, Senior Vice President, Research, Creation & Design, Taste, IFF
"Ultimately, success is defined by how effectively we connect deep consumer insights and the strong expertise of our flavorists and application designers to create meaningful, consumer-relevant innovation," says Adam Jańczuk, Senior Vice President, Research, Creation & Design, Taste, IFF.IFF
Q: Can you describe how your R&D process has evolved to better anticipate shifting consumer preferences?
Jańczuk: Our R&D organization has evolved from a traditionally downstream, problem-solving function into a strategic partner shaping innovation much earlier in the process. Today, we connect insights, innovation and formulation from the outset, ensuring our work anticipates, not just reacts to shifting consumer expectations.
Through our structured innovation 5D framework, our Re-Imagine and Re-Master programs, and the IFF Panoptic trends framework, we identify future-facing opportunities with clarity and discipline. But the real transformation lies in how we translate those insights. Instead of chasing individual trends, we focus on foundational pillars, such as Vanilla, Citrus, Meat, and Modulation (masking, mouthfeel, sweetness, saltiness, and umami) that cut across categories and drive scalable impact.
This approach encourages cross-category thinking, enabling technologies to travel further and deliver greater value for customers.
Ultimately, success is defined by how effectively we connect deep consumer insights and the strong expertise of our flavorists and application designers to create meaningful, consumer-relevant innovation. R&D is now about orchestrating the right capabilities at the right moment to help our partners stay ahead of what’s next.
Where Consumer Understanding Meets Smart Flavor Design
Q&A with Benjamin Mattei, Vice President, Intelligence and Digital Transformation, Taste, IFF
"We see AI as a way to give our flavorists 'superpowers': automating routine tasks, surfacing relevant insights at the right moment, and freeing up talent to focus on higher value creative and strategic work," says Benjamin Mattei, Vice President, Intelligence and Digital Transformation, Taste, IFF.IFF
Q: How do you balance innovation with consumer familiarity when developing new flavor profiles?
Balancing innovation with consumer familiarity starts with understanding whom we’re creating for and how ready they are to embrace something new. Through our proprietary segmentation model, we can clearly identify the drivers of choice across consumer groups, from those seeking bold, novel experiences to “traditionalists” who gravitate toward comforting, recognizable flavors.
The key is calibrating the level of novelty to each audience’s appetite for change. Any innovative element must deliver a clear, meaningful benefit that outweighs potential resistance to unfamiliar tastes.
For decades, we’ve studied the science of familiarity and developed a proprietary “newness” model that helps us gauge how consumers perceive uniqueness and sensory complexity. One of the most effective strategies is to anchor a flavor in a well-loved profile and elevate it with a distinctive twist. This approach preserves trust while adding depth and differentiation that keeps consumers engaged over time.
By combining deep consumer understanding with disciplined flavor design, we’re able to deliver innovation that feels exciting, yet still comfortably familiar.
Q: How is artificial intelligence or machine learning being integrated into your flavor development process?
AI and machine learning are becoming powerful enablers across different stages of the flavor development process, but always in a way that elevates, not replaces, human creativity.
At the earlier stages, AI helps us synthesize large volumes of internal and external insights, allowing us to explore a wider creative landscape and identify promising flavor territories with greater speed and precision.
Once a desired flavor tonality is defined, AI-based tools can support formulation work by highlighting relevant technologies, suggesting potential pathways, or optimizing- certain parameters. That said, we’re very clear about the role they should play. Flavor creation remains a deeply human craft, grounded in sensory expertise, cultural understanding, and emotional intuition. Algorithms can assist, but they cannot replicate the artistry of our flavorists.
We see AI as a way to give our flavorists “superpowers”: automating routine tasks, surfacing relevant insights at the right moment, and freeing up talent to focus on higher value creative and strategic work.
While we continue to experiment and learn, the judgment, experience, and creativity of our flavorists remain central to delivering superior taste experiences.
Translating Consumer Shifts into Opportunities
Q&A with Mimi Sherlock, Vice President, Global Consumer Intelligence, Taste, IFF
"The opportunity ahead is to connect these forces to develop real, scalable flavor solutions that are both future-forward and firmly rooted in what consumers genuinely love," says Mimi Sherlock, Vice President, Global Consumer Intelligence, Taste, IFF.IFF
Q: What key consumer trends do you believe will shape the future of flavor preferences and development?
Sherlock: Several shifts are shaping the future of flavor, pointing to a marketplace that is both emotionally driven and experience-led.
First, the need for comfort and indulgence remains a powerful driver, with nostalgia evolving into "nostalgia with a twist." Second, consumers are seeking bold, multisensory experiences that deliver excitement through contrast, intensity, and texture. Third, global flavors are becoming mainstream, with cross-cultural influences shaping everyday eating and drinking occasions as consumers embrace more diverse taste profiles.
Fourth, health and well-being are expanding into mood, mental clarity and emotional balance. Finally, digital acceleration is reshaping the trend cycle, allowing flavors to spread globally in real time while making trust, transparency, and authenticity non-negotiable expectations.
The opportunity ahead is to connect these forces to develop real, scalable flavor solutions that are both future-forward and firmly rooted in what consumers genuinely love.
