Want to travel the world, sample exotic fruits and flavors, rise above the canopy of a rain forest in a hot air balloon, and explore the flora and fauna in remote locations? Welcome to the world of flavor and fragrance R&D, as introduced by Jeffrey Peppet and Justin Sperry from Givaudan at the recent American Chemical Society (ACS) National Meeting in Orlando. Peppet and Sperry described how research teams from Givaudan explored the incredible bio-diversity on foot and by hovering above the forest canopy in a large hot air balloon, and evaluated and collected aromas in the field.

The fragrance and flavor industry is quite large. According to a March 2001 report from The Freedonia Group, "Worldwide demand for flavors and fragrances…is expected to exceed $18 billion by 2004, driven by strong sales in developing regions, especially Asia and Latin America." The total fragrance and flavor market in 2001 was about $11.0 billion US, as estimated by Leffingwell & Associates, an industry information services provider.

Givaudan is one of the oldest and largest flavor and fragrance houses in the world, with annual sales of over CHF 2.4 billion (approximately $1.6 billion US) in 2000. Givaudan has operations in over 40 countries and opened a new R&D center in late 2000, based in Cincinnati, Ohio, involving the collaborative efforts of over 500 people. Givaudan is the second largest company in the fragrance and flavor industry, behind International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF).

Givaudan's TasteTrek™ program involves the exploration and capture of food and flavors from various parts of the world by scientists to make additive products that mimic what is found naturally in the field. Their customers can then incorporate these flavors for use in commercial food and beverage development.

There are two sides to the TasteTrek™ program: exploration, which is going mainly into unexplored rain forests in search of novel ingredients in the biorich flora and fauna; and culinary, where scientists visit countries around the world, such as Korea and Vietnam, and capturing the aromas and flavors that emanate from the local cuisines.

Exploring the Rain Forest

Givaudan has sponsored two large-scale missions to Africa, first to Gabon (1999) and then to Madagascar (2001). The objective of these trips was to discover new botanicals that will produce flavors with potential market value. It could be a fruit or a flower, come from the canopy of the rain forest, the under story, the bark of a tree, a pod, or a root. Scientists have found many interesting ingredients from all different kinds of sources.

Scientists may also find new ingredients to enhance or improve existing flavors. You may find something within one of the samples that you can recreate that aroma or flavor but also use pieces of that somewhere else. For example, extracts identified that produce flavor enhancement from a fruit in West Africa have been used successfully to the same for a broccoli flavor, strawberry flavor, and shitake mushroom flavor.

Another goal is to identify new flavor molecules. Givaudan's fragrance ingredient group has a yearly objective to discover promising new and commercializable molecules. This allows them to expand the selection of materials available to flavor chemists by smelling and tasting the new discoveries. (Testing new recipes is clearly one of the best perks of the job!)

Traveling to Gabon and Madagascar are miracles of logistics because of the intense planning required to get the necessary equipment over to a remote location. The trip to Madagascar required shipping three containers of equipment and took five months to get everything into the camp. These are extremely remote locations to investigate since they have never before been explored as a scientific expedition for flavors or fragrances. The scientists worked in collaboration with a rain forest preservation group that works mainly to teach the local people how to use the forest and regrow the forest in a sustainable fashion. They also collaborated with botanists willing to climb the trees to bring back samples.

The trees in the rain forest are oftentimes 50 or more meters high and possess some really interesting botanicals at the top which you can't explore unless you have a way to get up there, such as a helium balloon or in a raft suspended from a hot air balloon. This requires taking off before sunrise, because the hot air currents make cruising over the forest canopy possible until about 7 a.m.

In addition to investigating the rain forest and canopy, scientists also visit local markets and villages for ingredients and interview local people to look at how they combine ingredients and what types of cooking processes they use.

In Gabon, on the west coast of Africa, scientists collected over 200 samples of items, most of which were tropical fruits. Scientists also collected over 140 headspace samples and 50 extracts that were sent back to Switzerland for analysis there. Headspace sampling is the fastest and cleanest method for analyzing volatile organic compounds. In this case, the goal is to capture the aroma molecules that are emanating from a sample into a trap.

Madagascar is exceptionally rich in biodiversity and has the highest rate of endemic species in the world. The trip focused on the Masoala peninsula, which largely consists of a national forest reserve, one of the only remaining primary forests left in the country. (Gabon and Madagascar are experiencing a very high rate of deforestation.) Working in collaboration with scientists from other Givaudan locations and local botanists, the goal was to search for new aromas and tastes along the coast, in and on top of the coastal forest and throughout the mountainous forest. The teams were up by 4:00 a.m. as the sun rises before 5:00 a.m. and set off in the balloon to work before the weather gets too hot. In two trips to Madagascar, scientists collected 120 headspace samples resulting in 40 being able to be reconstituted.

Culinary Focus

There is a great demand for authenticity in cooking due to the availability of information via the Internet, in the US with the availability of products in grocery stores, the expansion of available ingredients for cooking, and interest in the cuisines of other countries and cultures. It's hard to recreate a Vietnamese dish in a location such as Cincinnati even if you have the recipe. So Givaudan scientists visited local restaurants and worked with local chefs and culinary schools to sample authentically prepared dishes. Using the same technology used in the rain forest, they captured the aromas and tastes to recreate them for use in the manufacturing of prepackaged food and ingredients.

Givaudan also recently convened the Givaudan Chefs Council, a diverse team of culinary experts who will serve as an extension of Givaudan's culinary staff. This program is designed to focus on culinary trends, stimulate creativity and enhance innovation in the development of new culinary concepts. The Givaudan Chef's Council is comprised of a rotating panel of Chefs from Europe and the United States, from prominent restaurants as well as internationally renowned culinary schools, including the Culinary Institute of America (CIA).

Analytical Techniques

The goal is to recreate an authentic aroma. The challenge in meeting that goal is being able to capture the volatile molecules and bring the information back to the lab in order to recreate the flavors found.

There are three steps to recreating an aroma. The first step involves an aroma capture technique to collect the volatile compounds. The aroma reconstitution stage allows scientists to recombine those chemicals and put them into a final composition. The flavor development stage is where creation chemists adapt the flavor to go into various applications.

There are two headspace techniques that were used in the rain forest. One is the Thermal Desorption Device aroma trap, which collects the aroma in small tubes; the device is than attached to a gas chromatograph (GC) for separation and analysis. The drawback to this technique is you have one shot to get the sample properly separated for analysis so a couple of samples of each sample are needed for insurance.

Another complementary technique used involves a thermal desorption microtrap. This technique serves as a pre-concentrator to give repetitive injections allowing more ability to sample a given headspace vial.

Once the aroma impact compounds are identified, a list of components in the sample is generated. This is often determined spectrally with IR or with mass spectrometry.

Givaudan has developed proprietary technologies such as the Virtual Aroma Synthesizer (VAS), which allows aromas to be created and blended in real time according to exact customer specifications.

While flavor creation has come a long way, challenges remain. Invisible compounds that are detected by the human nose but not by analytical techniques cannot be reproduced. In addition, there are non-GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) compounds, which may have some market value but need approval. The benefits, however, are meeting consumer desire for new taste sensations; authenticity in taste; and responding to a global appeal for international cuisines.

Corinne Marasco is Content Manager of JobSpectrum.

Related Information

Givaudan sponsors the Ernest Guenther Award in the Chemistry of Natural Products, which is administered by the American Chemical Society. The purpose is to recognize and encourage outstanding achievements in analysis, structure elucidation, and chemical synthesis of natural products. For more information about the Guenther Award, visit the ACS National Awards Web site.

The ACS Education Division has developed a series of Chemical Careers in Brief to provide students with information necessary to make sound career decisions, and to give counselors a tool to assist students in the career-planning process. Read about working in the field of Food and Flavor Chemistry.

The ACS Division of Agricultural and Food Science is dedicated to encouraging the advancement and understanding of agricultural and food chemistry; and to promoting scientific interest and inquiry in agricultural and food chemistry.

The Society of Flavor Chemists (SFC) and the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) are also dedicated to the training of flavorists (flavor chemists). SFC has designed a rigorous training process for flavorists and IFT has approved 50 schools with food science programs.

• Cornell University
• Rutgers-The State University
• Iowa State University
• Michigan State University
• University of California-Davis
• University of Minnesota
• University of Wisconsin-Madison

Food scientists also work for the government at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or US Department of Agriculture (USDA).