New year, new products, and the same proven techniques that continue to uncover what truly resonates with consumers! In this blog, Fuchs’ sensory scientist, Vic Cappadora, breaks down the fundamentals of how we experience food, unpacking the roles of taste, aroma, and mouthfeel to reveal how each sense shapes our perception of flavor.
The Role of Taste
When you think about eating, what comes to mind first? Is it taste? While taste is often the first sensation we consider, the overall flavor of our favorite foods is far more complex than taste alone. To fully understand the sensory experience of eating, we must investigate taste, aroma, and mouthfeel, and how these factors come together to create perceived flavor.
The words taste and flavor are often used interchangeably; however, these sensations are distinct. The sense of taste, also known as gustation, is the detection of chemical compounds in the oral cavity. This includes the five basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. The ability to detect these basic tastes is a strong biological advantage for humans. We can identify nutritional compounds necessary for survival as well as detect toxins or signs of spoilage in our food. For example, tasting something sweet indicates an energy-rich food high in sugars, while a bitter taste could indicate the presence of natural toxins. Taste plays a pivotal role in the eating experience, but it doesn’t complete the picture.
The Role of Aroma
Aroma perception, or olfaction, is our sense of smell, which plays an even more essential role in flavor. To appreciate the importance of aroma, consider a time when nasal congestion due to
illness or allergies dulled your sense of smell. Food likely seemed bland and underwhelming. This occurs because detection of the aromas in your food is inhibited, forcing reliance on basic tastes alone. Eating without aroma is like listening to a song with the melody removed; it feels incomplete. One reason aroma is so important is its remarkable complexity. While taste relies on the five basic tastes, the olfactory system can detect combinations of more than 7,000 aromatic compounds.
Now that we understand the importance of gustation and olfaction, let’s briefly discuss the anatomy and physiology that make these sensations possible. Taste occurs in the oral cavity, where tastebuds are located. A common misconception is that the visible bumps on our tongues are taste buds, but these structures are called papillae. They are home to many, much smaller, tastebuds where taste receptor cells react chemically with substances in food. The receptor cells then transmit signals to the brain, resulting in the perception of taste.
The sense of smell occurs at the olfactory bulb located in the nasal cavity. There are two routes of olfaction: orthonasal olfaction, in which the aromatic compounds enter through the nostrils, and retronasal olfaction, in which aromatic compounds travel from inside the oral cavity, through the back of the nasal cavity to the olfactory bulb. Since retronasal olfaction occurs during chewing, it is often mistaken for tasting food. Like tastebuds, the olfactory bulb has specialized cells that recognize aromatic compounds and send signals to the brain for aroma detection and identification.
The Role of Mouthfeel
While taste and smell are critical components of flavor perception, the sense of touch, commonly referred to as mouthfeel, also plays an important role. Touch receptors detect the physical properties of our food, like texture, moisture, temperature, weight, and chemesthesis. Chemesthesis, or chemical touch, refers to the detection of chemical irritants that produce physical sensations such as burning, cooling, numbing, tingling, and nasal heat. Examples of this include the chemical compound in mint, menthol, which causes a cooling sensation, and capsaicin in chili peppers, which causes a burning heat. Other notable chemesthetic compounds include piperine in black pepper, gingerol in ginger, cinnamic aldehyde in cinnamon, allyl isothiocyanate in mustard, horseradish and wasabi, and hydroxy-alpha sanshool in Sichuan peppercorn. Incorporating ingredients that elicit these sensations can enhance the multidimensionality of the eating experience and increase overall liking.
Flavor is not the result of a single sensory input, but rather a combination of taste, aroma, and mouthfeel. Gustation provides essential information about the nutritional and safety aspects of food, olfaction detects the depth and complexity of thousands of aromatic compounds, and mouthfeel adds important tactile and chemesthetic qualities. Together, these interact to shape our perception of food. Recognizing flavor as a multisensory experience allows for a deeper appreciation of eating and offers valuable insight into how we can develop complex flavors that drive liking.
Interested in learning more about how to enhance your products through sensory science? Book your sensory training today!