Hello, hello, I'm Tanner Isom. I am in the powdered beverage lab; I am a product development manager. I love games, I love music, and I love movies. I just like storytelling. I think storytelling is fun and all the different mediums people choose. I was in a band for about 15 years. It was a lot of fun. Got to tour with my friends, got to put out some records. I do an annual fast for seven days of just water. It's a good little reboot. Not just for your body, not for just your digestive tract. But it's also really good for an emotional and mental rebalance. Pretty spiffy stuff. I started in the flavor industry back in 2011, That's when I met Jeff, who is Sensapure's owner, and I was just a dude in the warehouse. I was doing manual work in there. I was a picker. I'd get work orders and I'd pick them. There was an open opportunity the lab. So there was a tech position and I thought, “Oh, that sounds nice. I would love air conditioning.” So I went into there, I just thought, “hey, this is fun. I like making stuff.” With a to 9 to 5, this is one of the more creative options so I just stuck to it. It's a weird industry that you don't think of, but as soon as you hear about it, you're like, well, yeah, of course everything's flavored.

Are powders still relevant? It's growing a lot, actually. For the next five years, it's growing by about 10%. Pepsi is actually allocating a bunch of funds to new assets for powders, just powders. There's a really big narrative of convenience with powder. They can take it to the gym and they can add water there. So it's a bit more compact. So is it irrelevant? No.

All right. In the world of flavoring functional beverages, a base is what we refer to all of the active functional components in a product. This is being added for energy or for a certain nutrient. Those are the things that the product needs because that's what they want to put on the label. That's what they're hoping to achieve. But those are the things that taste gross. So that goes to the next part of flavoring. We have things like caffeine, we have nootropics, we have vasodilators, greens which you have all these great things, but they're really bitter. So you're dealing with a lot of uniquely bad tasting stuff. And they have off notes. They have their own characteristics. You first start with seeing what can't be taken away. This is a hard thing for people new to the industry to understand. But veterans will take it with the context. Some off notes of some functional ingredients can't be completely eradicated. I'll give you an example. Marine collagen. It's nasty. It tastes like fish. You're not going to be able to make it not tastes like fish completely. How to work with these things and how to flavor them is a phrase that I call ‘Appropriating the Off-Notes’ or ‘Appropriating the Flavor.’ So if you have a marine collagen that tastes like salmon water, you're not going to make that fruit punch. It's never going to be fruit punch. It's going to be cherry orange salmon. And that's disgusting. And that's not going to work. So what we do is we think, “all right, well what flavors can make this make sense to someone when they drink it? Because if you're tasting salmon, what goes well with salmon?” We did a lemon pepper. And you're like, “oh, that makes sense why I'm tasting lemon and pepper with salmon.” Another great example was fenugreek. It’s like a brown maple note, which sounds good, but is kind of like a rancid maple, if that makes sense. It was for a pre-workout, which are traditionally—because they have very tart ingredients—high acid, fruity profiles. We go for candy profiles for pre-workout a lot of the time. This one had that brown note and we were really struggling with that. We were coming at it with our traditional Blue Razz, Jolly Rancher watermelon, sour green apple, fruit punch. All of them were gross Because you'd be like, yeah, it is Blue Razz. And then gross brown sugar that's been in my shelf for too long. Like it was this really weird combo. So we started to think, “well, how do we make that brown note make sense?” And so we shifted to other flavor profiles that were adjacent to it. So instead of fruit punch, we did cherry pie. Instead of peach mango, we did peach cobbler. Instead of blue raspberry, I think we did like blueberry muffin. It's just little things like that where if you don't pigeonhole yourself to a very set flavor and you're willing to consider what your active ingredients are dealing you, you can make lemonade out of lemons. You know what I mean?

All right, so what flavors work best with certain ingredients? Pea protein is a black hole to vanilla, which if you add—you can't flavor it like a normal whey protein where it's just like, “oh yeah, it's vanilla flavored.” A lot of people try, but it always tastes like pea protein if you do that. It’s just—and to me it's like cardboard. I don't love the aftertaste of pea protein. It's got green notes. It's got off notes. And I mean, we've added grams, which is a lot. You don't—you're usually in the milligrams range when you're adding flavor. You'll triple, quadruple, you'll get up to these numbers that are NOT cost effective. And you still can't taste vanilla. So that's kind of a good example of what doesn't work. So what we've seen in the past that will work is going towards vanilla chai. You need something stronger to get it out of that black hole. I would try like a spiced flavor instead of just a basic vanilla. We've done this with like chocolate where we will add a chocolate coconut instead of just a chocolate. It's kind of going back to that ‘Appropriating the Flavor to the Base.’ Adapting to what you're dealt with. Amino acids are really, really bitter. They're fermented and gross. I think the whole industry has learned this trick. High acid flavors really address that well. So you'll see a lot of citrus flavors— candied, intense flavors— because that's what works with them. There's a lot of this tribal knowledge that goes across multiple companies where we've all just kind of learned, “yeah, that stuff's gross, but it seems like this works.” It really is like vastly trial and error. You take a sip and you're like, “that's gross still.” So you try something else and you're like, “that was a bit better.” This isn't going to be so much of like a “fruit punch works well with this, and peach mango works well with that.” It's going to be more of just like a catch all. Salts. Salts are the unsung hero of product development and flavoring. They're cheap and they work wonders. They make your flavor pop. They make the sweetness pop. They can do a lot.

If you use a flavor that doesn't work with an active ingredient, versus one that compliments it or appropriates it, you're going to get a bad clash. And this happens a lot with newer product developers not as familiar with what this product is going to taste like. Like, “this looks great on paper. This is going to give me all these benefits. And this has like antioxidants. It's got stress relief things. There's science backing that when these two ingredients are together they do this great thing.” So you can make great looking functional formulas. But then when you bring it to actually taste, it's going to be awful. And you're going to make a Frankenstein monster. You'll have to work around and compromise. And if you add a bad flavor to those active ingredients, obviously it's going to be just a bad experience. Somebody said to me once, “your functional label claim will make someone buy something once, but your flavor will make them buy it twice.” That's kind of a good way to look at it. Flavor really is king. Consumers are going to resort to what tastes the best. So to answer the question on what happens if you add a flavor that's not complimentary to a particular ingredient, you're probably not going to have as much success. Even if there is something that you're really excited about, see if you can find another source. See if you can find something else in the industry that we have found does a similar claim. See if you can be flexible with what flavors you had in mind. If you're really married to those active ingredients, try to find something that works with them. Greens and botanical beverages are becoming more and more popular, but they have really distinct flavors to them. Saffron, cumin— all these really bitter, herbal, distinct flavors need to be worked with, not covered. So, I don't know, try an orange ginger instead of orange cream. We want things to taste good, but we don't want it to be expensive.

There's always a question on how do you make a good flavor without destroying your budget. Honestly, one of the easiest ways to do that is by adding salts. And that doesn't just mean sodium chloride. We do that a lot. We go to that. But there are different forms that you can work with. There's sodium gluconate, there's sodium bicarbonate, there's potassium sources, there's also magnesium sources. Sometimes even some of our blockers and maskers will have these salts in them. We'll actually add them to the product. It's funny, we have a little bit of a reluctance towards salts. I think that stigma is getting broken, but back in the day, you know, sodium was scary. People were really concerned with their sodium intake. But we've seen a lot of people leading in the industry trying to debunk that. We're starting to see that a lot of people need more electrolytes in their diet. It helps with flavor too. You get like a cherry flavor that is the most bright or it’s kind of falling flat, you can add more acid. You can add more sweetener. And those are kind of the go-tos. But salt is an unsung hero that people always forget. More importantly in decadent flavors. I've been talking a lot about fruits, but you have your chocolates, your vanillas, your cinnamon rolls— it's just like baking. If you add salt to it when you're baking, somehow it's sweeter, somehow it's more flavorful and brighter, and it's cheap. It's so cheap! So just add salt, see what it does. And if you don't like it, get rid of it. It sounds like a very simple answer but it is, it helps in so many ways— hydration drinks, pre-workout, meal replacements— salt it helps with all of those. it really is just such a simple, easy, cost-effective solution. Most of the time it ends with us looking at each other when we're all kind of in the lab wondering, “Did you add salt?” “Well, yeah, I have a little—” “Add more.” You do, everyone's high fiving. It's like, “That was it! That was perfect. Okay, now it tastes good. Let's send it.” I've talked a lot about the salt. But one last thing I'll bring up when you're trying to achieve an affordable, good tasting flavor system—also acids. If you're in the fruit realm, acids are naturally occurring in fruits and are a great way to make them stand out more.

The difference between flavor maskers and flavor enhancers: they're both considered FMP, but one targets sweetness in particular, where it's really only going to help boost your sweetness that you've already added. And a lot of the times that is in the form of a high intensity sweetener in and of itself. And then the other side of it, the modulation side, doesn't always just go for making it more sweet to get rid of bitter, because that is the best way that the industry has found to combat bitterness. But there's other tools you can use too—(*clears throat*) salts—but you can also do other things that we've added. A good one is a protein masker that we made. It very much classifies as a modulator because it doesn't remove the bitterness or anything, it changes it. It kind of gives it more of a grainy note. It's like a cereal note which can be easier to work with versus, a green pea cardboard aftertaste. So that's an example of a modulator.

The easy answer from where natural flavors come from are from the plants and fruits that they're being labeled as. So if it says it's a natural strawberry flavor, then that means that the components that made that flavor are from strawberries. The difference between Type and WONF is really just a paperwork exercise. So I can give you an example: ethyl butyrate. It's a naturally occurring chemical that's in most fruits that you eat. It's an apples, it's an oranges, it's in strawberries. Flavor chemists will use it to add to a flavor for a generic fruitiness. It tastes candied, it's nice, it's light, and it brings a lot of fruit evocation to our palate when we try it. You can get ethyl butyrate from a lot of places because it can come from all those different fruits. If you have a strawberry flavor and you have ethyl butyrate in it, you can now say, “all right, this strawberry has ethyl butyrate and ethyl butyrate is in strawberries. This is a natural strawberry Type flavor.” It really comes down to a paper exercise of if you can trace back those components to the fruit. And that just requires a lot of extra testing. It's possible, but it also makes it more expensive. Suppliers won't always have the paperwork that shows this lot came from a strawberry; this lot might have come from an apple. But it is coming from a naturally occurring source. So you put Type. It's a Type of strawberry, but it doesn't have the paperwork to prove that it is directly a strawberry. So when we go to someone who is more concerned with that from a regulatory, we-want-our-label-to-be-clean prospective, they say, “hey, we want it to make sure that it is coming from a strawberry.” The best way to do that is to add an extract from that fruit, because now you can say “yes, this for sure— this strawberry juice concentrate that's in this strawberry can be traced back to a strawberry.” So this is a strawberry WONF. WONF means ‘With Other Natural Flavors.’ And the reason why it has with other natural flavors attached to it is because you're basically saying strawberry is the star and he's got his other buddies with him. So yes, it has strawberry and we have the proof that we can tie it right back to a strawberry. But it also has some other guys that come from apple, and it's also got some guys that come from cherry, so those are other natural flavors that are with this. Another really, really easy example is just citruses because they always have their other friends with them. So if it's a lemon flavor, most of the time it's going to be a lemon WONF because it's lemon with other natural flavors, because it's got lemon oil, but it also has lime oil and orange oil.

Pairing certain acids with certain fruits is a really fun and important part of making a beverage that is going to be fruit-based. It goes into a conversation about climactic and anticlimactic fruit. The difference between that is if the fruit still ripens as it is removed from the plant. So climactic fruits continue to ripen. You can think of bananas, avocados, apples, a lot of orchard fruits. Things that are not climactic stop once they're taken off the plant, like oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruits. You can kind of see a trend there: a lot of those citrus fruits don't. Citrus fruits are high in citric acid. So we're probably going to add more of the other fruit acids, which is malic acid, tartaric acid. Fumaric is an interesting one because it is the acid that is early in the fruit stage. It's the really, really green, bitter tart that we taste when we eat a fruit that's underripe. As the life cycle of the fruit progresses, its fumaric acid goes down, and then the other ones come up. There's an observable trend with that as well, with climactic fruits having more malic acid, which tends to be a later stage. More sugars start to be added to the fruit, it becomes more sweet. We also see a decline in citric and an increase in malic. And then also just from a sensory evaluation perspective, we've also noticed that citric is tart up front, tartaric is in the middle, and malic is at the back end. if you're thinking it needs a little more acid, like a tartness in the back, you're going to go to more malic. Or if you're thinking, “I want to brighten up the front,” you'll add more citric. So it's really fun to look at the nature of a fruit and then trying to apply it to the drink. It can really make your beverage have a more authentic experience.

We absolutely do taste with our eyes. Color changes the way we perceive flavor. It is proven time and time again to me. And it's hilarious. I love it. I was flavoring a pre-workout for this guy, and he wanted an undetectable flavor. He just wanted it to be something good, something candied, but he didn't want it to be necessarily tied back to a particular fruit. We call that a fantasy flavor. Blue Razz is the most recognizable one for us these days. I thought to myself, “all right, let's just make a good flavor and then we'll change the color on it.” So I made a watermelon and I colored it blue, and he was obsessed. He thought it was amazing, he thought it was the best thing, he thought it was really complex flavor. He finally came and asked me. He's like, “I have all these people that love it. What did you do?” And I was like, “I made blue watermelon. That's all it was.” He's like, “no, there's like, there's a coconut in there and there's a, there's a lime. I can taste, there's—” Like, “No. there's not. It's just blue watermelon.” So that's a good example. Another one, and it's funny that it's blue as well. Maybe it's just because blue goes so well as a fantasy fruit flavor. Glacial freeze, the baby blue Gatorade is primarily orange. And if you close your eyes and you take a drink of the blue Gatorade, you're going to mostly taste the orange flavor, now that I've told you that. If you want to make a unique flavor, just color it differently from what fruits you're using, and it'll really throw people's brains off. Do I have any recommendations of what color a functional beverage should be? Kind of the same mentality of what you do with the flavor: work with what you've been dealt. Products that have a lot of vitamins and mineral blends things like B12, make it very pink. Start thinking about, well, what pink flavors can I do? Can I do a strawberry? Can I do a guava? Maybe I go back to watermelon. It's not necessarily a, you know, the best answer is obviously blue. Make it blue. Make everything red. Make everything blue. No—work with what you're dealt with. Some active ingredients make it kind of cloudy. Work with that as well.

We've talked about flavor, we've also talked about color, but there's also the texture. A lot of people say, you know, “mouthfeel.” It’s just a fancy word for texture. In regards to thickness, it really comes down to the client preference. Sometimes they want it to be a little more thin. Other times they do want it to drink more like a shake. I think the biggest complaint across the board is when it is gritty and when it has clumps or chunks, you know, that's the least appetizing experience you can have. So those are the biggest things that we're looking to get rid of when we're looking at flavoring high-protein-based beverages. To fight those, A lot of the times we use emulsifiers and gums. An industry leader in that is TIC Gums. They have a bunch of great stuff. I'm not getting kickbacks from them. They just really are good. They have a great one called Ultra Smooth, which does exactly what we're talking about, where it just smooths it out. Pea protein: it's getting better now, but earlier, earlier when it was brand new to the industry, was so gritty and so rough to drink. Even if you got a good flavor, you'd be like coughing because it would get stuck in the back of your throat and stuff. Nobody wants that experience. So the industry all came up with solutions. You have soy lecithin, you have all sorts of different kinds of gums, and they have all sorts of different kinds of functions where they can either thicken it or just smooth it out.

How you support an indulgent flavor while maintaining a clean label, low calorie, or other claims they want to keep and maintain. It's going to come back down to those high intensity sweeteners. They really are our biggest tool. Whenever we're making decadent flavors and you don't want to add sugar claims in high calories, you're going to have to turn to high intensity sweeteners, almost guaranteed. Aside from that, I'm going to say it again salts. You can try adding salt to it and stuff. Obviously, you're going to need a sweetness source. So those two work really well. It's really just coming down to any fun little tool you have in the kit to make it evocate a certain flavor. A lot of these people are very disciplined in the sports nutrition industry, and consumers don't get a cheat day, they don't get a cheat meal. And this protein shake is their dessert. You have to take it with a grain of salt; it is not a piece of cheesecake, it is a shake trying to resemble a piece of cheesecake. But it's our job is to try to make that as close and as pleasant of an experience as possible.

We are seeing a trend in cleaner and cleaner labels. It started with the sweeteners. I think the biggest thing that I have seen personally is how much we have worked away from certain sweeteners. You have low intensity sweeteners. Obviously, sugar is the golden standard, but there's a lot of sugar alcohols that are 80% the sweetness, 90% of sweetness, but super small fractions of the calories. But then there's always drawbacks that come out later where there's like intestinal distress. So people get scared of that. And then there's high intensity sweeteners. You have sucralose, which is an artificial sweetener. And that is the exact opposite of what people are talking about when they say clean label. That's what I saw very prominent when I first started in this industry. And we're using it less and less and less. It became more common to see stevia. And now we're starting to see literature grow on that, where people are starting to become concerned seeing that on a label as well. We're now resorting to...I see monk fruit a lot, and we're seeing other extracts from plants that will give us a sweetness without a caloric or a sugar claim. You'll have people using those kinds of alternatives. High intensity sweeteners are some of the most successful, dependable to get a clean label that still tastes good. We'll use that all the time in the industry. But you'll also want to ask your client and see what they are willing to add. Can we add a creamer? Can we add MCT oil? I've gone back to this again. Salts. You'll ask them, “hey, do you mind if you have a sodium claim on your label?” Because that can be, as I've said, a cheap great way to make the flavor pop. Other things that we're seeing in there as far as trending flavors and trending actives, we're seeing more fiber. It's a high daily value that you need, more than what most people will get close to. I think it's thirty grams, which is nuts. From a flavor perspective, I think we're seeing the high intense candied sour sweet flavors kind of going away. And I think we're seeing a lot more refreshing light flavors being requested. And I think it's kind of going hand-in-hand with the clean label that everyone's wanting. They're wanting a clean label, and they're wanting it to taste natural and light and healthy for you.

A common industry mistake when people are first getting into formulating— we've all been there, and it all takes a sec to kind of learn that dial—but you can easily over-flavor things and you can easily over-sweeten stuff, especially with high intensity sweeteners. They have a threshold where if you add too much, they can actually add bitterness, and then people get concerned and then they think, “I need to add more sweetness.” And it's this terrible toppling snowball effect. Flavors, particularly spray dyes, which is a very, you know, common format that we use for powdered beverages and products, can have a high chemical burn taste if you get too much. I know that's kind of scary sounding, If you go too far, you might think, “oh no, this is tasting bad,” and you might be miscrediting it to your functional ingredients and thinking, “oh, I can still taste the caffeine.” Caffeine's really not that bitter. You can cover it pretty easy. You might be adding too much of your flavor and now you're getting a flavor burn.

When someone is getting into formulating a product, something that they may not realize is going to be a big cost driver: the sweetness. Especially since we're seeing more and more high intensity sweeteners as the base component of sweetening the product. They work magic because they make things very sweet and they don't add calories, but you kind of pay for that. Like, literally: it's very expensive. And so people have to keep that in mind and new things will come out on the market all the time where they're like, “this is even a cleaner stevia. This is an even cleaner monk fruit. It's even more potent.” like, “that's great, I loved it. How much does it cost?” And then they're like, “so, here you go.” And then they run because those things are expensive. So much of the ingredients we use in this industry are susceptible to the whims of the world and the natural disasters and shortages. I remember there was a cocoa shortage, and so people were like, “all right, we're going to launch with a vanilla this time instead of a chocolate.” It was a growing concern for a while because the cost of it doubled, then it tripled, and then its supply got more and more, delayed. Yeah, just keeping up with literal world news and making sure that product that you have is using something that has a stable source, things like that.

Oh boy. Okay, here it is. This is the finale, right? If I had one piece of advice for a brand making its first product or trying to make a name for itself, my advice would apply to something on a grander scheme. This is my favorite question by far. I like this because it is something that I'm really passionate about I ask myself this kind of question a lot. I have always subscribed to the belief system of, you can't lead in an industry if you are a follower and if you're trying to follow trends. If you're looking at other people's success and wondering, “how can I do that?”, you're already in the wrong mentality. You shouldn't try to catch someone else's wave of success; you'll always be left in the wake. If you have that mentality, you should try to make your own wave. Be authentic, be sincere. The best kind of products in any industry come from people that want to make the products, not necessarily just want to make money. You need to be honest with your client and honest with yourself on what you're wanting to make. People can sense that; people sense sincerity. The most successful brands that I have seen aren't asking what the trends are; they're just doing what they want to do.

Thanks for listening, thanks for joining. And yeah, I'm excited to flavor the next product with you.

*Video made with a few clips from freepik.com