Another busy week at the FIC as usual but the highlights of this week were the FONA flavors class and the ideation session we had on Friday. With the flavors class it was put on by the FONA flavor company who have chosen as a company to use all of their marketing money on educating people about flavors. They did an incredibly good job teaching the class. For being eight hours straight they never lost my attention, they really knew how to set up a class in order to keep people interested. The last flavor class I took was more focused on creating the language of flavors so companies knew how to ask for the precise flavor they were looking for, but this class was more focused on how people perceive flavors as well as how flavors are combined to try to recreate a flavor made by nature. An example used in the class was apples and how an apple has approximately 2500 flavor components to create the signature apple flavor and how some products will use 2300 flavor components to try to recreate that flavor while others will just use the 50 most characterizing flavors of an apple. While it does not taste exactly like an apple it has enough of the flavor components of an apple that people can perceive the flavor as being apple. Another example discussed in the class was with chocolate milk and how if chocolate syrup is put in skim milk the flavor is sharp but disappears quickly but with milk having a higher fat content the flavor is more subtle but it will also linger on your tongue which creates a much more desirable taste. Overall it was a very informative day that I would gladly sit through again. Later in the week was the ideation session for salad dressings. We tasted 25 different dressings and it was surprising how few of them our group collectively did not like. I find it interesting how with every tasting I have done at the FIC I seem to like a certain sample the most while everyone else collectively thinks that that particular sample was their least favorite. While annoying some times to always be the outlier it is also important because I represent a different section of consumers which shows that while the people in the group tasting may not like a certain sample it does not necessarily mean that consumers will think the same.
