How Food Got Divorced From Flavour
Natural flavour? Nature-identical flavour? Artificial flavour? What do they really mean?
Welcome to Truth Be Told, the weekly food and fitness newsletter published by The Whole Truth Foods.
Editor’s note: So much of the discourse around the food industry centers on whether packaged food is “good” or “bad” for our health. This assumes that the problem with processed food is a problem with nutrition alone. I have always found this framing off, because while yes, nutrition absolutely does matter, it reduces food to nutrients alone—and ignores how food is also about culture and how we form relationship with the world around us. Food choices aren’t made simply based on what tastes best, but who makes it and how. At least that's how I think.
Which is what you will discover in today’s deep dive into the world of flavours from my colleague Anushka Mukherjee. Read to learn how you get orange juice without any orange, why industry adds lab-made strawberry flavour on top of real strawberries, and what to really make of claims like “natural flavours only” on packaging. This piece should clarify so much about what passes as fake-tasting—yet often delicious—products in the market, and why this matters for our food environment.
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Last year, I read a short, punchy edition of the New York Times' daily newsletter, The Morning, about Melissa Kirsch's futile attempts to recreate a takeout Caesar salad she'd eaten countless times during office lunch breaks. No matter what she tried, it never tasted like that simple takeout salad.
She confirms what many of us already know: she couldn't replicate that salad because its taste was inexorably linked to the experience—sustaining herself with a quick meal amid a hectic workday.
It's the same reason my homemade bhindi aloo sabzi never tastes like the one my brother and I would hungrily wipe from our plates with rotis after exhausting school days—despite following the exact same recipe.
I kept coming back to these subjective experiences of taste as I explored the world of modern packaged food. Growing up, I loved desserts and ice cream with subtle strawberry and vanilla flavours—flavours that now evoke more nostalgia for me than the fruits themselves.
This surprising realisation made me wonder: what exactly is flavour, and why is it so deeply connected to our memories and experiences?
What is flavour? And what is industrial flavour?
Flavour is more than just taste—it's a complex sensory experience combining taste, smell, texture, and even emotional context. It basically includes any substances, extracts or preparations capable of imparting taste or odour to food.
Think about the juicy sweetness of a mango, the warmth of cinnamon, or the complex richness of chocolate—each has distinctive compounds that our brains register as their unique flavour signatures, often tied to specific moments in our lives.
When cooking at home or in professional kitchens, we extract flavours directly from their source—garlic from cloves, citrus from fresh zest, herbs from leaves. The flavour and its source are one and the same. Flavour comes from food.
But as I discovered, in the world of packaged foods, this connection isn't always so straightforward: the flavour doesn’t have to come from food.
Follow the incentives. Manufacturers prioritise flavours that are consistent, shelf-stable, and cost-effective. Rather than dealing with the variations of seasonal mangoes or paying premium prices for saffron, the industry prefers standardised solutions. A packaged mango juice or strawberry ice cream needs to taste the same whether you buy it in Mumbai, Delhi, or Bangalore, and must remain unchanged on the shelf for months.
That's where food science enters the picture—where scientists found ways to create flavours without using the original food source at all.
But how? Time for a history lesson.
How chemists learnt to recreate nature
The 19th century was a special time for organic chemistry. Chemists had just discovered that they could synthesise new compounds through industrial processes, without plants involved. During their experiments, they noticed something remarkable: familiar aromas emerged from their lab work, like amyl valerianate producing a distinct rotten apple smell. They would catch a sweet whiff here, a sour tone there, and immediately think: Grape! Lemon!
Chemists quickly recognised they were working with the same compounds that are found naturally in fruits, spices, and flowers.
They identified dominant compounds of these foods—called esters (chemicals responsible for fruity smells)—and discovered they could isolate them from cheaper, more accessible sources. They mixed these compounds with other substances to produce the strong flavour of a food.
As their experiments grew bolder, they found that compounds in petroleum—yes, the stuff used for fuel—could also have a nice, familiar, fruity aroma. And so your cherry flavour can come from petroleum!
How is this possible? It turns out that petroleum contains complex hydrocarbons that, when processed, yield compounds chemically identical to those found in fruits. And flavour compounds is what matters.
This marked a fundamental shift: flavour was now about specific compounds—not just about food.
How the exotic vanilla became ordinary
A great example of how chemists transformed flavour into isolated compounds is vanilla, whose story dates back to 1858. This is when Nicholas-Theodore Gobley, a pharmacist and chemist, isolated a compound called vanillin from vanilla—a chemical that gives vanilla its rich, deep flavour. It's responsible for nearly 30% of vanilla's aroma.
But it wasn't feasible to extract vanillin from the plant all the time—vanilla is very rare and expensive. This discovery actually just helped scientists find vanillin elsewhere.
And so, the first successful artificial vanilla flavour was created by Ferdinand Tiemann and Wilhelm Haarmann, who synthesized vanillin from clove oil, plants, wood pulp and even unexpected sources like cow feces.
They started a vanillin factory, and thus began the journey of vanilla from a rare, exotic spice to…being vanilla. Commonplace. Normal. Boring. Because nearly all the vanilla we have is actually vanillin.
Today, nearly all "vanilla-flavoured" products use vanillin from trees, petrochemicals, or plant polymers—not real vanilla beans. Real vanilla remains rare and expensive—actual vanilla ice cream has visible specks of vanilla seeds and subtler flavour. I don't think I’ve ever tasted real, undiluted vanilla.
This story demonstrates the key principle: what matters chemically is structure, not source. If compounds from wood pulp and vanilla beans are chemically identical, our brains can't distinguish them. Once scientists discovered this principle, they began applying this technique to virtually every flavour imaginable.
One particular example of this I really like is the purple-grape flavour. Think about it: purple drinks or candies taste nothing like actual grapes; they're flavoured with methyl anthranilate, which was first isolated from the essential oil of orange blossoms by chemists in the 1890s, just because the compound smelled like grapes. Today, this ester is cheaply mass-produced from coal byproducts.
“Natural”, “Nature-identical” and “Artificial”: What’s the difference?
Understanding this history helps us decode those terms on food labels: “natural flavour”, “nature-identical flavour” and “artificial flavour”.
Let's break them down:
1) When you see “natural flavour” on a package, it simply means the flavour compound was extracted from some plant, herb, fruit or flower—any natural source, not necessarily the food it tastes like. That orange flavour in your juice? It might actually come from a completely different plant that happens to contain an orange-smelling compound.
2) “Nature-identical flavour” means the compound has the same chemical structure as something found in nature, but was created in a laboratory—essentially a middle ground between natural and artificial. (I think of it as artificial only—no difference!)
3) “Artificial flavour” means the compound was extracted from a non-natural source like petroleum, or created in a lab using bacteria or yeast. Remember that cherry flavour derived from petroleum? That's an artificial flavour.
Here's what most consumers don't realise: the chemical compounds in all three categories might be absolutely identical. So while these classifications create an illusion of meaningful difference, what they're really just telling you about the source where the compound originated—not the effect on your health.
Now we know how the word "natural" carries powerful psychological weight. When we see "natural flavours" on packaging, we tend to imagine actual fruits or spices being carefully extracted. In reality, these "natural" compounds often undergo extensive chemical processing that bears little resemblance to how we'd prepare food at home.
Brands capitalise on this perception gap. They're not required to specify the actual source of their flavour extracts—only whether they're natural or artificial.
The psychology of engineered flavours
At this point, you might ask: what's the problem? Even if the flavour comes from a different source, why can't we just enjoy them?
That's true, I'll admit: the real issue with these lab-made flavours isn't their chemistry—it's their impact on our relationship with food. While these flavours are regulated for safety, they've created three problems.
First, they've industrialised taste. Flavouring technology disconnects taste from actual food, creating a system where anything can taste like anything else.
Second, they enable lower quality ingredients. Manufacturers can use cheaper base ingredients and simply add flavour back in. A quality orange juice should contain 100% juice concentrate, but many brands reduce this to 10-20% (saving money) and compensate with orange flavouring—creating something that tastes "orange-y" without much actual orange.
Third, they've rewired our expectations. Food scientists develop "perfect" flavour profiles designed to trigger maximum pleasure responses in our brains. Over time, these intensified artificial flavours become our new normal. Real vanilla may now seem bland compared to the artificial version we've grown accustomed to.
This becomes evident in some strange practices: companies making sweets with natural strawberry pieces and oils still have to add strawberry flavouring liquid because the natural fruit doesn't deliver the intense taste we now expect.
The new nostalgia
This is where the story comes full circle. (Remember I started with memories of that caesar salad and bhindi aloo.)
Our relationship with flavour has fundamentally changed, which is not simply about “healthy” or “unhealthy”. The point is that what began as scientific curiosity in 19th century labs has reshaped how we experience food and memory.
The manufactured strawberry flavour in that childhood ice cream wasn't trying to be a perfect copy of a real strawberry—it has become its own authentic experience with its own nostalgic power.
And that’s the untold truth: we outsourced the creation of our flavour memories to laboratories—and we didn't even notice it happening.
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Great learnings here, bookmarked this piece for future reading again
Very well brought out - only thing is readers should not just read and forget what's detailed here in but, realise the harm it causes to all of mankind and act wisely.
Why make any industrialis rake in heavy profits at the cost of our health.
Wake-up call to all.