The Economics of Everyday Things - 114. Natural and Artificial Flavors

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

How do flavorists capture the essence of a fruit and put it in a can of sparkling water, or a tub of yogurt? Zachary Crockett takes a bite. SOURCES:Terry Miesle, master flavorist at Sensient Technologies Corporation. RESOURCES:"Flavor and Well‐Being: A Comprehensive Review of Food Choices, Nutrition, and Health Interactions," by Sakhawot Hossain, Abdul Wazed, Sharmin Asha, Alomgir Hossen, Nur Muhammad Fime, Shamiha Tabassum Teeya, Lubna Yeasmin Jenny, Diptho Dash, and Islam Shimul (Food Science & Nutrition, 2025)."What is artificial banana flavor made of? A food neuroscientist reveals the truth," by Elana Spivack (Inverse, 2024)."Are ‘Natural Flavors’ Really Natural?" by Roni Caryn Rabin (New York Times, 2019)."The Inexorable Rise Of Synthetic Flavor: A Pictorial History," by Nadia Berenstein (Popular Science, 2015)."The Flavor Industry: From 1945-1995," (Chemical Sources Association). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When most of us take a trip to the grocery store, we see fruits, vegetables, and spices. Terry Measley sees chemical compounds. Clove is eugenol. Basel is methyl-cavacal, tarragon is estrogol. Garlics are sulfides called trimethyl sulfide. Cilantro, the leaf, that's transdu decenal, and undescenal, which is 11 carbons long an unsaturated aldehyde, but the seed is coriander, and that's mostly linolul. Do you just have like an encyclopedic knowledge of all these in your head?

Everybody has the capacity for this. We have the sensitivity, and we have the ability to differentiate, but what we don't have is the language. And that's really what a flavorist does is build that language. Miesley sees food this way as a matter of habit. It's his job. I'm a master flavorist with a company called Sensient. We make natural flavors, natural colors, and numerous other ingredients. I want to know the physiology of the plants, of the fruits, of the meats, of the chemistry, of what happens as it cooks, all that sort of thing.

You've probably seen the terms natural flavors or artificial flavors on the labels of your groceries. These flavors are products created in laboratories by people like Measley, and they're a multi-billion dollar industry. By one measure, nearly 40% of all packaged foods sold in the U.S., from sparkling waters to salad dressings, contains some kind of flavoring. What are these flavors exactly? How are they made? And why do we use so many of them in the first place? The strawberry you have in your ice cream might not be the same strawberry you want in your yogurt. This industry is built on custom solutions. has its own thing, and nobody wants theirs to be the same as everybody else. For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things.

I'm Zachary Crackett. Today, natural and artificial flavors. When you eat something, say in orange, you experience its flavor through an intense combination of senses. First thing you do is you see it, right? We select fruit for better or worse, by sight. We pick up a Valencia, a navel. a cara-cara, a blood orange, and look at them.

When you peel it, you're releasing oil from the peel, and you're smelling that immediately. You slice it open, you're then releasing the aromas from the inside, the pith, the meat of the orange. When you taste it, when you pop it in your mouth, now it's exploding. You're immediately tasting, acid, bitterness, sweet. As you chew, chemicals in that orange dissolve in your saliva and activate taste receptors in your mouth.

At the same time, aroma molecules, circulate through your nasal passage to smell receptors in your nose. All of these receptors send signals to your brain. And with the help of other inputs, like the texture, temperature, and spiciness of the food, your brain assembles a perception that we call flavor. At a basic level, flavors are just chemical compounds. These compounds occur naturally in the plants and animals we consume. But you can also capture the essence of a flavor in a life,

lab, and put it in a tub of yogurt, a piece of candy, or a can of sparkling water. And that is where professional flavorists come in. If you think of something like strawberries for your yogurt, you can use a strawberry jam or fruit preparation. But if you take those strawberries and you vacuum, distill them, and you pull off what we call the essence, and you smell that, and it smells like strawberries, it tastes like strawberries, and it would be used at a few tenths of a percent in a product. Now, you've change the form of that. It's no longer strawberry jam. Flavorings

are used in thousands of food products around us in daily life, from seasoning packets to soda. For the most part, everything needs a little help. Things like beverages, it's carbonated water, sugar, and acids, and the rest is flavor. Some of these flavors are labeled as

artificial. Others are labeled as natural. The defining line is where do the starting materials come from. You can have the same chemical compound, say, a menthol into your breath mints. If it came from a mint plant and was extracted, you can say natural.

For artificial, it would be something that does not come from a natural source. So if I'm drinking a sparkling water in a can and it's orange-flavored and it says naturally flavored, that would be a flavoring that has been distilled from an actual orange. If it says natural orange flavor, then it all comes from orange.

If it says orange flavors with other natural flavors, that means there's orange in there plus other stuff. Those could be flavor chemicals. They could be other citruses. I think there's an assumption that natural means, you know, someone just threw an orange into the water and let it marinate in there. But it sounds like there could also be some chemical intervention. Right. And we have to remember chemistry is just how we describe the world around us. I can make an orange flavor that doesn't have any orange in it. So why do we need artificial and natural flavoring in the first place? Why not just put real oranges in hard candy and soft drinks?

On a practical level, you can't put orange pulp in a can of sparkling water without fundamentally changing the product. But if you extract the essence of the flavor and turn it into a liquid or powder, it's easier to integrate. You're changing the form of these things. As soon as you extract them, now we can start playing with salt. and try to get these things that don't want to be in water, into water. Or sometimes we dry them.

A lot of stuff is dry mixes and things like that. Artificial flavors can survive high heat, long storage times, and exposure to light and oxygen. We've all got tins of spices in our cabinets that should be thrown out. That cumin is not very cuminy anymore. But if you're doing a flavor, which is based on that cumin, that's generally very stable. it's packaged correctly, it can last a very long time. There's also availability. Many plants can't be sourced year-round

or may involve sustainability or supply chain concerns. Artificial flavoring can be provided on demand at a consistent quality level. So remember, food is agricultural, and every year you're guaranteed to have a shortage of something or another, right? You don't want to be reliance on one place.

We're having problems again in Madagascar, so vanilla is going to be a problem again. For food manufacturers, flavorants come with economic benefits, too. A few drops of artificial orange flavoring can replace a whole lot of puree from real oranges. The cost-effectiveness is a piece of this as well.

The artificial flavors are going to be cheaper. It's much stronger you can use less of it. All of this makes flavor a huge business. The global market for natural. and artificial flavors is around $17 billion. Big food and beverage manufacturers have their own flavor teams in-house. But they're also dedicated flavoring companies,

like G. Vodon, IFF, and Sensient, where Meecely works. There are groups that do beverages. They do the sweet side of things. Desserts, ice creams, bakery stuff. So think of the nuggets that are in your ice cream of any different type. On the savouring of things, we do a lot of sauces, dips, dressings, snacks as well. Measley has worked in the flavor business for 34 years.

Like many in the trade, he got a degree in food science before working his way up the chain. You start off as a technician, working for a junior-level flavorist, and you do what they tell you to, and you'll learn it, and they're watching you the whole time. At some point, in every flavorist's career, they generally have to choose a flavorist's career. they generally have to choose a side, sweet or savory? Initially, I was working on the sweet end of things, ice creams, beverages, even into alcoholic beverages and such, but I grew up in the kitchen, in my heart's in cooking.

So I wanted to go to the savory stuff. I've been on that side ever since. So what does a professional flavorist do all day? And how do artificial and natural flavors come to life? What the food manufacturer wants to do is they want to make it like their own and different from somebody else, but still recognizable as that fruit. That's coming up.

Let's say a food manufacturer asks a company like Sensient to create a mango flavor for a new yogurt product. The first thing that Terry Miesley and his team do is a mango interrogation. What mango is your target? Because there are a lot more mangoes than we get here in the U.S. How ripe is it? Do they want it a little less ripe?

Or do they want it very ripe, almost senescent? Once Sensient has an idea of the mango nuances the client is going for, they'll often go out and buy a lot of mangoes. So we're going to taste those things, and we're going to start describing them. A flavor's builds a whole language. We don't have good languages to describe our senses.

To describe a smell, we use associations, a lot of the time. For a mango, they might come up with a descriptor like juicy tropical or honeyed richness. And then they have to find the chemical compounds that will create those sensations. But that's no simple task. Fruits like mangoes are made up of hundreds of aromatic compounds, like esters, terpenes, ketones, and alcohols. Flavorists have to use an analytical technique called gas chromatography

to separate this complex mixture into individual compounds. Measley will then use his deep knowledge of these compounds to select the right ones for the job, sometimes even by sniffing them. We know the different classes, the different families of these compounds.

So when I say it's simple ester like ethylbuterate or ethylacetate, I smell that in the brain. That means something to me. I also know what family of compounds those are, what size they are, and all of that sort of thing, how they fit into the whole web of flavor chemistry.

A flavorist might realize through this process that a mango contains a group of ester compounds like ethylbutyrate. It may have a middle note of lactones, a base note of ionones, and a top note of monoturpenes. For Terry Measley, that's a ticket to flavor town. So we've got a list. Now we start building our flavors together.

We know these sulfurs work well in tropical fruits. Let's put a few keys together using some of these and see where it goes. How many compounds might be used to create something like a mango flavoring? 16 to 25, somewhere in that range for mangoes, depending on how much lifting the flavor has to do. If a client requests natural flavoring, a team can extract compounds from natural sources, like plants. If they're open to artificial flavoring, compounds can be synthesized from chemicals that are identical to those that exist in nature. Artificial flavors are often derived from byproducts of wood pulp or petroleum.

Those are the easiest places to find many different complex hydrocarbons and organic molecules. They also tend to be cheaper to produce in the lab. A mango tastes like a mango because those are the compounds of the mango. Now, we don't always have all of those. there might be some portion of it that they describe that are not available naturally. They might be available synthetically, maybe not. So then that's up to a flavor is to be creative.

Start finding other components that might start to close that gap. The team will test these blends of compounds in various carriers, like alcohol, glycerin, or oil to make sure the flavoring is stable and food safe. And before it goes out to the client, it goes through all kinds of small final tweaks and some interesting tests. The customer expects that flavor to deliver for the entire shelf life of the product.

Now for a yogurt, that's generally not that long. A canned beverage, substantially longer, right? A frozen dessert, if you take care of it, that can last for a very, very long time. They'll all have dates that they're pulled by. The customer will have a pilot plant, so a small-scale plant that will process their food exactly the same as their large-scale plant will,

they'll store it, and then their sensory people will come in and they'll have a fresh batch, a midpoint batch, and an endpoint batch, and they'll taste it and go, is this acceptable at this point? What changes have happened over time? When the testing is done, new flavors often go through a voluntary approval process. Food and flavor companies in the U.S. sometimes use a legal loophole that allows them

to bypass federal regulations. If a flavoring is deemed to be generally recognized as safe by an in-house expert, it doesn't have to get FDA approval. And since flavors aren't technically a food, they're also subject to different labeling requirements. That's why you see the generic natural and artificial flavors in so many ingredient lists. So, for example, garlic powder, that's an ingredient. That has to go on the label.

If I have an extraction of the garlic, that's a flavor. I can call it out if I want. I can say extractives of garlic, but I don't have to. A new flavor often takes years to develop and integrate into a food product. And all told, the development fee for a signature flavor can cost anywhere from $75,000 to more than a million dollars, depending on complexity. A big part of that cost is all the R&D and labor. But some of the molecules don't come cheap either. Sulfur compounds, because they're so difficult to make, are very expensive.

And I'm talking thousands of dollars per kilo. You know, spilling a drop of that is spilling $400 bucks. We want to minimize that, and we'll do that by buying dilutions. Who sells this stuff? Any industry has layers in layers, right? So we have suppliers that focus on mint oils. That's what they do. They sell mint oils.

I know flavors that develop mid-flavors, and that's all they do. Once the flavor is done, flavoring companies will typically stay on with a food manufacturer and provide flavoring for the product on an ongoing basis. The cost to produce a metric ton might be a few thousand dollars, which works out to less than a penny for each yogurt cup, soft drink, or candy bar. These formulas are often top secret. Everybody knows what's in that yogurt. they can look at the sugar, they can look at the acids and the bacterial strains and all this

kind of stuff. But what it comes down to making something unique, it's the flavor. We want to protect it as much as the customer wants to protect their business. I'm curious, there are thousands of products on the market with mango flavoring of some kind. There's alcohol, there's sparkling waters or yogurts from dozens and dozens of different companies. presumably like each one of those companies contracted with a different flavoring company. But at the end of the day, aren't most of the compounds that underlie that mingo flavoring fairly similar? It's akin to art where, you know, anyone can go down to the art store and buy the same watercolors. Consumers will often point out that natural and artificial flavors never really taste like what they're trying to imitate, especially with things like candy.

flavors become caricatures and then they become recognized caricatures so you know your watermelon jolly rangers you wouldn't expect those to be based on the fruit themselves it doesn't work that way and it wouldn't taste the same so the goal isn't necessarily to mimic the exact naturally occurring flavor the goal is almost never to fully mimic the thing you will never make it exactly like you could from nature. Some flavors in particular are notoriously far from their natural counterparts. And in some cases, that has to do with history. Banana flavoring, for instance, was supposedly based on a banana varietal called the

Grosmichelle, which was wiped out by a killer fungus in the 1950s. Today, nearly all bananas on store shelves are of the Cavendish variety, which tastes entirely different. But the banana flavoring in taffy or hard candies remains largely the same because people developed a preference for it. You grew up eating watermelon jolly ranchers.

You want that taste still. You don't want to change. It's never going to change. Other flavors don't exist in a natural form. Blue raspberry is its own flavor. It's not raspberry. It's not strawberry. It's not strawberry. It's its own thing. A lot of these profiles

were developed back when we didn't have a lot of tools. And it goes back to like Victorian times when some of this, chemistry was a new thing and they're developing these esters and like, oh, well, that's kind of apple-like. It's delicious. It's an apple candy. And some of the strawberry hard candies are like that. You're like, this is strawberry?

I guess so. But they're just frozen in time. They're an artifact of 150 years ago. Not everyone is on board with the chemical manipulation. of additives that go into their food and drinks. But Terry Measley says that, regardless of the origin source of a flavor, everything around us is made up of the same molecules. I think a lot of people just fear the word chemistry.

They fear the word flavor, but everything has flavors. As soon as you don't put raspberries in that can of soda, it's pretty much a flavor. Whether it came from raspberries or not, It's a product that has to go through a lot of work to get to your belly. For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crackett. This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz-Rapson.

We covered so much in this conversation. conversation. I know we just scratched the surface. And the surface smelled like orange oil. The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.