Inside the Food Labs
A tantalizing tour of the kitchens where culinary scientists fine-tune the flavors and architecture of tomorrow's hit foods

There are a lot of different factors Micheale Kester has to juggle when she invents your next scoop of ice cream. Right now she's not as concerned about flavor or texture–although those are important–as she is about architecture. Kester, a food technologist in the Burbank, Calif., labs of ice cream giant Baskin-Robbins, has been fooling around with an idea for a flavor she calls Cinnamon Bun, but first she has to make sure the stuff will hold together. If you're not careful with the size and number of your chips, nuts or bun bits–what the ice cream techies call inclusions–even the densest scoop of the richest brand can fall apart. "Any inclusion larger than three-quarters of an inch may be too big," says Kester, scooping up a handful of cake pieces and tossing them into a bowl of white ice cream base. "Sometimes it's guesswork."

But Kester doesn't really have the luxury of guessing. Baskin-Robbins' trademark list of 31 flavors has expanded to almost 1,000 since the company was founded nearly 60 years ago. To keep that number growing, eight food technologists in the Burbank facility each come up with about 20 new flavor brainstorms a year; of those, perhaps three or four make it to the big leagues. The shelves of canisters filled with Oreos, m&m's and other colorful inclusions that line the laboratory walls certainly keep the ideas flowing. So too does the dream of being the person who develops the next Pralines ‘n Cream–perhaps the most celebrated member of the company's flavor roster. "It's a fun job," says Kester. "I get to play with food every day."

Of course, play, as Kester is the first to admit, is only part of it. The food trade is a $500 billion industry in which uncounted new products jostle for space on overstocked shelves. Fully 25% of all meals are now consumed in restaurants, and of those eaten at home, two-thirds are either prepared entrees or restaurant takeout. With all that, Big Food has had to become Big Science. Companies that want to stay in the game can't afford to drift along with the same product line year after year until someone in R. and D. dreams up another Pop-Tarts or Pringles. Nor can they afford to have a good idea and then let it die from poor execution–simply that the corn in the corn puff was the wrong texture or the cavity in the cupcake crowded the filling.

As a result, the food industry has become a place where product design is micromanaged as never before–where flavors are built literally by the molecule, salt crystals are measured by the micron, manufacturers agonize over which side of a chip is the best place for the flavoring, and any new product under development must be focus-grouped and taste-tested down to its last scrap of fiber and last drop of corn syrup.

"The eating experience has so many different factors–smell, texture, taste and different combinations of all of those," says Nicole Ifcher, a marketing manager at Nestle. "If the idea doesn't resonate with consumers, they won't buy it."

Complicating things further is the speed with which American food fashions change. No sooner do manufacturers devise the perfect product for the perfect niche than new categories open up. What's a U.S. food company to do when Latino consumers–13% of the U.S. population and growing–begin clamoring for the aguas frescas and spicy tamarinds they grew up with? Where do foodmakers turn when kids–who never met a food they wouldn't prefer sweeter, saltier, chewier or bluer–create a whole new demand for so-called extreme flavors? And what do they do when all those new choices begin contributing to an exploding American obesity epidemic and the same people who have done all the consuming suddenly demand the foods they love in lower-fat formulations?

FLAVOR WITHOUT THE FAT

The obesity problem in the U.S. has reached epidemic proportions, with 65% of the population considered overweight or obese. The pressure is increasing on restaurants and manufacturers to get at least some of the fat out of food. The difficulty, of course, is that fat is often where flavor lives.

Researchers at International Flavors & Fragrances (iff) and other flavor companies have ways to get around that. A critical element in fatty foods is mouth feel–the creamy, palate-coating character of, say, thick pudding or cheesy lasagna. Scientists can mimic that feel with substances such as starches, polysaccharides or lactones (a natural product of fermentation). These lower-cal alternatives can give food a higher-cal feel. "When you create the impression of fat," says Miller, "you also enhance flavor."

Other tricks are simpler. Stouffer's, for example, has found that crushed tomatoes in its Lean Cuisine line go a long way toward enlivening foods stripped of their fattier ingredients. "The tomatoes have more body and a riper taste," says Kathy Klingensmith, who works in R. and D.

Also important is avoiding dryness. Fatty food is usually moist, and for consumers accustomed to gooey cookies and premium ice cream, something that's both dry and fat-free might as well be tree bark. Developers thus fortify foods with substances known as humectants–glycerin, sucrose or similar ingredients that hold moisture.

Certainly not everybody needs or wants to know about the humectants in snacks. Scientific reductionism is fine in astronomy or physics, but it's another thing entirely when your dinner is involved. There are few things more intimate than the preparation of food–an ancient, imprecise craft built on pinches and dashes and tasting things at the stove. What are old-style cooks to do when this quiet craft is elbowed aside by an industry in which flavor concentrations are measured in parts per billion and companies like iff can sell, without irony, a product called Fleximint, "a tool kit for mint work"?

Traditionalists may abhor all this, but the food scientists are only doing what we ask them to do: respond to the needs of 280 million people all trying to eat at once and do so in the most enjoyable, affordable and nutritious way possible. It's the industry's job to fill the national plate; it's our job to decide which parts of that vast meal we want to eat.

—from TIME, October 6, 2003

Questions

1. Of meals eaten at home, what percentage consist of prepared entrees or takeout from restaurants?

2. What statistic in the article shows that obesity in the U.S. has reached "epidemic proportions"?