Consumers today place great focus on sustainability. Caring for planetary health is driving their consumption habits and demands, especially in food and beverages. Avoiding food waste with concepts like ‘reuse, reduce, recycle or re-engineer’ form the dominating trends. At the same time, taste continues to drive their preferences. Important buying criteria for food and beverages include signature, rich taste as well as authentic, natural ingredients. Consequently, food and beverage manufacturers must combine both consumer wishes with great tasting, authentic products while ensuring sustainable development processes.
“Consumers want to know and understand what their food consists of, where the ingredients come from, how they get processed, and how the planet and people throughout the production process benefit,” says Leif Jago, Global Marketing Manager Food & Beverage at Symrise.
Valorization of natural product side streams for flavor creation
Symrise SET Flavors™ addresses these consumer wishes and matches the future’s ecosystem deployment. It supports the innovation network with strategic partners to source, enrich, decode, and optionally transform nature’s complexity for the creation of taste solutions by using selected natural raw materials.
SET Flavors™ makes natural raw materials accessible with a smart combination of extraction, separation, and concentration technologies. This includes adsorption, nano- and ultra-filtration, fractional distillation, and osmosis based on advanced membrane developments. These technologies enable Symrise to access the enriched and authentic essentials needed to deliver nature´s full complexity in its product solutions.
In addition, SET Flavors™ links closely to the technical research platforms of Symrise: Sensory Guided Analysis, AgroScience, Biotechnology, and Separation Technologies. They combine the objective to identify, enrich and reconstitute side stream materials. This aims at degrading or eliminating undesired odor and taste actives from complex raw materials and enriching the pleasant components of raw materials.
SET Flavors™ covers the utilization of solid or liquid side streams from the food industry – including pomaces, sift outs, materials from the preservation process, vegetable processing, fermentation, and cell materials. This approach helps Symrise identify value adding components. By using natural conversion processes – such as biotransformation via enzymes or fermentation – SET Flavors™ generates signature profiles for use in beverage and culinary applications, which contribute to culinary complexity and pleasant taste profiles.
Authentic, signature taste for food and beverage manufacturers
“Our new brand SET Flavors™ is championing a dedicated combination of technologies to source, enrich, decode and transform value from nature,” explains Stefan Brennecke, Master Technologist and Head of Separation Science in Research & Technology Food & Beverage at Symrise. “In doing so, it generates a unique value proposition for our products and customers to serve superiority and consumer preferred market products.”
The technologies enable a better use of existing specialties and solutions to achieve a certain taste or aroma effect, including juiciness, masking, complexity, and authenticity. Their deployment enables Symrise to provide uniqueness and added value to its taste solutions, delivering signature food and beverage products for customers. SET Flavors™ deploys various principles of circular economy and contributes to a more sustainable food system by processing materials from side streams.
The SET Flavors™ technologies are established in production or pilot scale. Based on the composition of the new raw materials, the Research & Technology and Production teams use their expertise to modify and optimize processes. Using this as a base, the research platforms are continuously exploring new technological approaches and processes to reduce costs, energy and avoid waste materials.
“As a new brand, SET Flavors™ strongly align with the core competencies of Taste, Nutrition and Health – supporting sustainability as an integral part of our company philosophy,” adds Uwe Schäfer, Director Applied Research in Research & Technology Food & Beverage at Symrise. “With the combination of great, authentic taste and sustainable practices, SET Flavors™ contributes to our approach towards naturalness in the Symrise code of nature™ platform. The brand supports manufacturers to develop unique food and beverage products, while responding to the consumer need for sustainable and planet-friendly consumption.”
