I'm Scott Zimmermann. I've been at Sensapure as a Master of Flavors for three years. I was years old when I started in the industry. 42 years! My father was a perfumer and a flavorist. Some of my earliest memories were of him coming home smelling like whatever he had worked on that day. Growing up in Brooklyn, some days he might smell like cotton candy, and other days he might smell like some fine woman's fragrance. So that was the initial curiosity with aromas and tastes. Did food science at the University of Guelph. While I was going to school for those first two degrees, I started working part time at the flavor and fragrance company where my father worked. I started to get a little good at it! I worked as a lab tech for several years, and then my dad finally came to in the early 90s and asked me if I wanted to do the seven year apprenticeship with the Society of Flavor Chemists. So after seven years, I tested, I went directly to fully certified. Now it's been more than two decades as a certified flavorist.

I’ve done a lot of traveling. Even after I was certified, I could sometimes take 3 or 4 months off and travel. Brazil and South America. The Amazon. Through the Himalayas and Thailand, East Africa, the Arctic. Obviously, I would try and learn the language before I went there, and always sample the local cuisines. I've had gazelle, I've had zebra. Wild boar on the spit. I've had anteater: kind of an interesting taste. In East Africa, we often got to try local beverages, fermented beverages. There's a tree in Tanzania, they refer to it as a sausage tree, with these huge fruits that hang. They look like big white 20 pounds sausages. Cut them, put them, with a starter and alcohol, and they would ferment. An interesting taste, kind of like a Tanzanian tepache, for lack of a better description. A lot of fun. Everything was an inspiration to me. Now I train 4 or 5 trainees here at Sensapure. In only the three years that I've been here, the building has gone from just a flavor lab to a full service beverage and powder applications lab. God has brought me to the right place.

The beverage world has changed in significant ways. 3 to 4 decades ago, most of the beverage products were either sodas, juice beverages, or what we used to call belly washes, which are cheap kids beverage flavors (Hawaiian Punch types). Now, you've got walls of refrigerated beverages: immune beverages, hydration beverages, CBD beverages, energy beverages. It brings all its own challenges, both with the finished beverage itself and the additives and the flavors you add to it. When I was a kid, there wasn't lychee mango. There was root beer, cream soda, orange, and if you were lucky, strawberry. Now, I rarely get requests for those basic flavors. Now, the beverages have adaptogens, nootropics, proprietary vitamin blends, meal replacement beverages, it's got ashwagandha, it's got ginseng, it's got dairy protein plant proteins, soy protein, pea protein, fermented proteins, other types of new proteins that are coming out all the time. All of those kinds of proteins have their own particular characteristics. They're either, vegetative, they're chalky, they have aftertaste. So now, when we approach flavoring a beverage, it's a multilayered approach. It's a much more sophisticated approach than 30 years ago. I remember when Gatorade first came out, when I was kind of a kid, that was a sophisticated as it got because they would have some electrolytes in it, but usually they just threw in a strong punch flavor. Now, you've got to consider the interaction of your flavors with the base itself, with the additives, with the caffeine. So it becomes a layered approach. We have people who come in with concoctions that they think is going to solve the world's problems. It's going to be the most wonderful thing ever. It's unique. It's different. And then when we taste the base and we go, hmm this is going to be a challenge. And they want their product to taste perfect. So we have to take a multi-layered approach. We have to use maskers, bitter blockers, sweetness enhancers. And then finally we'll add a flavor on top of that. You've got to think of the synergy of all of that together. 30 years ago if you were flavoring a root beer soda, you could pretty much do it in 1 or 2 tries. Now, it might take 10, 15, 20 iterations before we think we have something that might be palatable to the consumer.

The new innovations in sweeteners for beverages have changed a lot. 30 years ago, it was either sugar or non-sugar. Now, most of the customers come to us with some sort of unique sweetener system for their beverages. We all know of the the full cal and the zero cal ones. 15 to 20 years ago when stevia first started coming out, we all remember it being rather metallic, among other things. So the first stevia glycosides were Reb A the purity was only maybe 70%. It wasn't very good. These were the early days. That's matured over time. So now the stevias with which we work with at Sensapure are like a 98 plus. A fermented Reb M or a combo of some of the other rebaudiosides, so they work very well. Some customers might use an allulose. Allulose exists both in a powder form and in a liquid form. Allulose is a very good sweetener base that mimics sugar fairly well without some of the negative-ness, aftertaste. Some of the other sugar alcohols still have their issues. Some of the synthetic zero cal sweeteners, of course, we're all familiar with sucralose and Ace K or neohesperidin dihydrochalcone. They all have their own unique characteristics. Some of them peak too soon. Some of them linger afterwards with a metallic taste still. As the beverage projects have become more layered and more complex, it exponentially increases the challenges. Not only do we deal with the customer's base, we're dealing with the acids they use. We're dealing with the sweeteners they use. Are they using a caloric sweetener? High fructose corn syrup or cane sugar? If they're using a zero cal, they'll often ask us which ones work best. But as you layer something else onto the beverage base, you're exponentially creating more potential variables. What starts out maybe as a simple flavor brief can turn into tens or scores of iterations that we have to do. So we'll often blend zero cal sweeteners together to ameliorate early peaks. Soften the aftertaste so it doesn't linger too long. Like on an X-Y graph. We're accustomed to that sucrose hit and peak and then tail off. Then even once you get a balance of the sweeteners, how does it interact with, say, bitter notes in the base? Or once we layer a flavor note on top of that, how do the sweeteners carry the flavor? Too long, too short? Because every one of these ingredients is going to a spot on your tongue where our receptors are. So we might balance adaptogens, bitter notes, with the sweetener, with the acids, with everything else carbonated still. They're all going to the right place. And then we add a flavor and all of a sudden the sweeteners are plunking that citrus flavor or vanilla flavor into a spot in your palate, and it doesn't go away. You don't want an aftertaste or linger of the flavor. You want it to come, to taste, and then move on. It's an incredibly sophisticated way of building beverage. And it's important for people to know that that simple Tetra Pak of a processed beverage could take hundreds, if not thousands of hours of iterations and R&D before it makes its way to the shelf.

When we're trying to balance the functionality of the base, whether it's a hydration beverage, energy beverage, stimulant beverage, relaxing type beverages, the functional aspect of most of the beverages is where the challenge lies. Much more with that than with the flavor, adaptogens, stimulants, or even relaxing or mood modifying type of notes. They all have unique characteristics. Whether it's astringency, bitterness, acidity, chalkiness, our challenge is to ameliorate those, mask those, and then layer a nice flavor on top. So that's the challenge. And that's where our scores of iterations come in. The flavor is the easiest part, actually. But don't tell anyone.

Some flavors obviously work better than others, depending what the functional beverage is. What we call brown flavors tend to work better through the heat processing. When you first dose the flavor, say, into that protein beverage and you taste it unprocessed, it tastes tastes lovely. And then when you process it, it can often morph into something very different. Brown flavors like we would say the vanillas, tiramisu, chocolates, will often work best within those types of conditions. And sometimes they even get better, which is interesting. Whereas in a processed beverage, it's difficult to do say a nice lychee or a strawberry because those flavors, which may be based more with higher volatile esters, get lost in the heat process. And what starts out as a lovely strawberry Nestle's quick unflavored base morphs into something very different through the process. In terms of carbonated energy beverages or proteins that might have bitterness and acids in it, sometimes the dark berry flavors or the cranberries or pomegranate flavors work better because they can help mask some of the bitter notes. We may add a bitter masker or a protein masker or a sweetness enhancer, but a flavor like, say, a pomegranate not only works well with that, it helps ameliorate some of the bitterness of the base. Like cures like. The bitterness is still there, but it's not as significant because you've already got a certain kind of flavor in there.

If we're getting new functional ingredients that are part of a customer's base, that creates new challenges. We try and get as much information as we can about what's in the base. In the case of something brand new for us, it was a brand new kind of plant-based protein or nondairy protein. It didn't have that particular traits of a soy or pea protein that we've kind of gotten used to working with. We know how to mask them. We know how to layer things on top of it. We know what flavors work. This protein created brand new challenges because it had characteristics both with texture and with aroma and with the visual color and the flavor that were unlike anything else. This had its own indescribable sort of profile. We're constantly in contact with the customer about the science of technology of how it's created. Okay, what sweeteners are going to work with this? Can we use sucralose or ace K? Do you want us to use monk fruit? Where in the world is this going to be sold? If it's just North America, then we can use a particular pallet of materials. If it's going to Japan or the EU, then there are materials we can and can't use. We have this product. We don't know how it's going to behave when it's exposed to direct steam or indirect steam and OMVE equipment. The customer didn't even know how it was going to behave. They came to us first. we had to hold their hand from the beginning. So we began the iterative process. We ran some unflavored bases using their protein on its own and maybe with some other plant based proteins just to kind of enhance it and support it. We came up with some ratios that worked. The next step is to add sweeteners and flavors, do it again. Some of the berry flavors worked well. Curiously enough, brown flavors worked better. So then we go back to the customer. We do some tasting and presentations. We're pretty happy with the success so far.

We all have a style. All of the senior master flavorists all have their unique style. I'm usually very complex, perhaps too complex, sometimes. I like an unlimited palette to work with. I sometimes act like a diva and say, "Don't restrict my palette. I want every ingredient in the world at my disposal if you want me to do a good job." I had the unique privilege of having a perfumer train me, and thus my love for making flavors that smell really nice, too.

You can't just be a flavorist anymore. I also have to know the science of all the other ingredients that are in the product. If a customer is adding adaptogens, I have to know how bitter is it? What is it going to do? How is it going to interact if it's carbonated or still? How will my flavor behave in that? So say, if we have a customer who's created a brand new fermented protein or plant protein that has its own unique characteristics bitterness and aftertaste, when we run it through the processor, when we run it through our OMVE or our microthermics, we have to know: how does that behave when it's processed? Okay. Now let's add some flavors to it. Suddenly, that lovely fruity strawberry flavor turns into something quite different and it may have also interacted negatively with the base of the protein. So as flavorists, we have to understand the whole complex science. We also have to learn what flavors work best in what kinds of bases. So the days when my dad was a flavorist, and they just said, "hey, we need a nice strawberry flavor, make it, put it in a bottle, send it off. You're done. Brief, complete." It doesn't work that way anymore. Even if I make a brand new dulce de leche flavor, my job has just begun. We have to know the science. We also have to have strong sensory science background. When customers or panelists describe things in a certain way, we have to understand what they're describing. It's another language. Their comments might be, "oh, I didn't like this. It tastes like, a lotion, or it tastes like floor cleaner or whatever." We have to understand and translate what it is they're saying into a plan of action. Okay, eight out of ten people have said that it tastes sort of plasticky. What does that mean? So a flavorist now has to understand what that means and to look at the formula, and go, "oh, that's probably what they're talking about. There's too much citral in there. Or some of the flavor has oxidized in the HTST process." We have to be more than just flavorists now.

There's sort of two strands of trends in flavoring functional beverages right now. The customers more and more don't want to use any preservatives. So back in the day you could use sodium benzoate or potassium sorbate and you wouldn't have to worry about heat treating even the carbonated beverage. So now, very few customers want to have sodium benzoate or potassium sorbate or BHA or BHT on their label. The protection step has to be heat processing. We've got to know flavors and products that will stand up to the heat process. So one of the trends is in the ingredients in beverages. In the scramble to distinguish your product from all the other ones on or off the bandwagon, we get some interesting requests for flavors. At Sensapure, we're ready to do any kind of flavor. Myself and our team have done everything from apple to Zinfandel wine. So if somebody comes to us with a lychee passion fruit chamoyada request, we can do that. What's started in confections maybe 10, 15 years ago was sweet heat flavors. Pairing a sweet flavor like, pineapple with a heat flavor. So you'd have pineapple habanero, strawberry chipotle, things like that. Or even chili chocolate flavor. So there are trends. Some of those obviously don't work in beverages as much, or at least in carbonated. Trends in protein beverages now are very much brown flavors, heated brown flavors. I tried the five chili chocolate in a process dairy beverage and you wouldn't think, but it tastes fantastic. Everything is fair game now.

Back in the day, when customers asked for flavors of the flavor company, mostly N artificial or what we call natural and artificial or N&A, usually works best. It wasn't as much of a deal except for some maybe high end products. The definition of natural flavors, it is in the code of Federal Regulations, is all of the ingredients within the flavor system have to come from natural sources. So what's considered natural is fermentation, steam distillation, cold pressed, CO2 extraction, etc. Organic natural flavors, (of course, there's no such thing as organic artificial flavors), most organic flavors are either 95/5, meaning 95% of the flavor is from organic sources, and up to 5% have to be from organic compliant sources. And then there's also a 70% organic, which some people put on the label just so they can use the word organic. But you cannot use that little organic, that little leaf on your product unless it's at least 95/5 or 100. So in the case of organic ingredients, ethanol is from organic sugarcane. The orange oil that I use for my citrus flavors from organic orange oil. And any of the small components, flavor components, that may not exist organically, they have to be organic compliant. Meaning, they're not extracted with inorganic solvents. Typically they're just either fermented or are steam distilled. Organic natural is is a very clean, honest designation.

Throughout my career, when we've been asked to do flavor pairings, a lot of fruit flavors work well with spice flavors. We'll sometimes get a combination of tropical flavors with a berry flavor. Lychee, mango, blackberry. Or we may blueberry with a white peach. In terms of flavor pairings, all bets are off now. Everybody's always looking for something unique. When flavoring a product like kombucha or it's cousin tepache, which is sort of done with pineapple instead, citrus flavors work well. Stone fruit flavors work fairly well. Depending on where the product's going to be sold to, if it's, Central America or South America, we're trying to use flavors that work with that particular demographic. When kombucha first started hitting the shelves, maybe 10, 12 years ago, they were either unflavored or they just used a bit of juice concentrate. Or they added chia seeds or something like that to it. Now for kombucha, we get all the dark berry flavors, the raspberries, blackberries, tropical flavors. Pineapple, of course, works very well with kombucha. And we've started to get some floral, fruity combinations. Elderflower, lavender, things like that.

In terms of using savory flavors within the beverage industry, they usually are not preferred on their own. I might pair jalapeno with a blueberry. Now versus 20, 30 years ago, thankfully the palate of most North Americans is much more tolerant of savory and spice, but it's still best to pair it with something sweet that tones down some of the boldness and aggressiveness of the heat. So we might do Habanero coconut. So you get some of the heat, but then the soft creaminess of the coconut tames that flavor. In terms of the sweet spices, the chais, eggnog, etc, they tend to be seasonal. We're trying to pull some of those otherwise seasonal sweet spices into a year round thing. So we might have like a vanilla chai. We might pair eggnog with something else which brings it into the 12 month realm rather than just a seasonal thing. Sweet Heat flavors are always among my favorites.

Seasonal flavors have always been an important part of consumer expectations. The fall winters are the apples ciders, the mulled cider, the chais, the eggnog, etc, tend to exude a warming effect. Obviously, it's why people have soup in the winter and don't have soup in the summertime. The warming spice flavors, the brown flavors, are a little more common in the fall/winter. Typically spring summer are your citrus and herbal types, you know, your mojitos, mandarin orange, things like that, because they enhance the mood or the feeling of that season. You're not usually going to have an eggnog flavor in July when it's 42°C out. Right? You're going to have spearmint lemon flavor. They do have a cooling mint flavors. Curiously enough, some people identify them with the winter, but some of the mint flavors are year round flavors. Spearmint more so. Peppermint, of course, mentha piperita or mentha arvensis are more of a winter flavor. But spearmint, mentha spicata, is a little more of a summer type flavor. Some of the citrus flavors will work all year round. We probably do less work in citrus in the summertime. What we might describe as All-American flavors might be year round, the colas, root beers. Now with a very different demographic in the US as 30, 40 years ago, almost all of the tropical flavors my parents would have never heard of are now year round flavors. You might drink a a mango beverage in December, you might drink a mango beverage in July. Fruits are more of a year round thing, but even that's beginning to break down as the palate of flavors becomes more sophisticated and consumers are asking for more and more trending flavors. We bring in more flavors from South America, East Asia, that my father even would have never heard of. He would have never gotten a request for a durian flavor or for yuzu. Now those are common. A flavor that was obscure 5 or 10 years ago works its way up the chain, the flavor radar, until it becomes mainstream within 5 or 6 years, which is kind of a fun trend to see.

In terms of the role that aroma plays, I'm going to make flavors that smell just like fragrances. The experience and the nuance of the perfumes helps guide when I create flavors. When we send a flavor itself to a customer, not a finished product, and they're going to do the R&D at their end, I have this unique chance to win three quarters of the battle by sending them something that smells really nice. What's the first thing they do? They don't open it and drink it. They don't even open it and put it in the base first. The first thing they do, they unscrew the cap, they smell it. More often than not if I send them something that smells nice, they will try it. And even if it needs to be modified, they may come back to us and say, "oh, it's lovely, but it's lost a little of its orange blossom note along the way." Usually, I can make a simple modification to that. In terms of finished products that are carbonated, they're carbonated not only for that effervescent feeling, but the carbonation itself carries the aroma of the flavor. I mean it's part of that retro nasal process. If someone's opening a can of a carbonated clear protein, maybe, the first thing they do, of course, is they put it to their mouth even before they drink it. The carbonation, the carbon dioxide, is carrying flavors up into the retronasal palate. If the aroma smells good, either in a little bottle or in the finished product that the consumer opens, the aroma sets the stage for the taste. Psychologically, if you're opening a can of watermelon flavored beverage and it smells good, chances are it's going to taste good. So whatever flavor I send to them, if it smells good, I've won half the battle already. And if it tastes anything close to the quality of the smell, then we have a win.

When we're helping a customer launch a new beverage product, from the concept to getting something on the shelf, it can be a long process. Everybody thinks they can get their product to the shelf in 3 to 6 months. Doesn't usually work that way. It's usually 12 to 18 months minimum. One of the advantages of being, say, first to market you've already done a lot of background work. You can be first to the shelf. Unfortunately, by being first to the shelf, you're inevitably vulnerable to knock offs. So for the customer, there is that inevitable timeframe that has to be dealt with, costs of R&D, the cost of doing proper paneling. But the advantages is we will take your hand. We have the skills here to walk you through every aspect of the process. We at Sensapure can get your product to the shelf in what we describe as, say, concierge service. We'll take you from beginning to end. We'll help recommend co-mans, canners, or packagers. We can help source and supply your raw materials. We can be an all encompassing sort of concierge service.

So terms of advice that I would give to beverage entrepreneurs: make sure there is a market. Do proper paneling. Bring in partners, like Sensapure, to help you with the paneling, with the marketing. A second bit of advice would be is, identify is your product that unique? The market for functional beverages: that's a very crowded bandwagon. Have you identified the proper niche? Are you just jumping on that crowded bandwagon, or do you have something that's unique and different? Of course, everybody thinks theirs is unique and different. "Oh, I've just taken the same stuff that everybody else is doing and rearranging it some other way." That may have a limited sales life. Don't compete with everything else that's out there. You're going to be battling for shelf space. You're going to be battling for distribution. Find that niche, nourish that niche. Be aware that as soon as you create a product, someone's trying to knock it off. I've seen stuff come and go. if you've got something unique, you may be able to ride that for a few years. Start with only 3 or 4 flavors, identify which ones sell best, be ready bring flavors in and out. Think about LTO's. Stay ahead of the beverage trend game. Always be identifying the next thing and be willing to move on. Most North Americans have taken a hit healthwise and physically from the last few years. The new beverage trends that our customers need to see is cardiovascular health, immune support, reproductive health. So identify what type of additives do people want to see in their food and beverage products? There's a thousand energy beverages out there, don't jump on that bandwagon. Energy beverages come and go. Now we're into the relaxing beverages. So first they stimulated you for 3 or 4 years, now they're going to relax you. Here's the 1A bit of advice; whatever your beverage has in it, taste is still the most important thing. Everybody will buy your new beverage once out of curiosity, but I want people to be buying it 20 times, 30 times, 40 times. And that will come down to flavor and taste.

I want all of our customers to know the type of service you'll get is something of which I'm very proud. We have the skills base to take the customer all the way from the beginning idea to the end. This is not just a marketing blurb; I've seen it even in my three years here. Don't be shy about a new idea or a new flavor: we've done everything. We have a strong team of six flavorists here. I'm very proud of the work that all the scientists have done. Think of us first when you want an honest, caring, responsible partner.