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future of flavor

June 13, 2025

What Flavor Unlocks

Sustainable, healthy foods won’t win through guilt trips alone—they need to be irresistible.

Flavor is the most powerful force in our food system. Not nutrition labels, not health claims, not environmental impact. It’s flavor. It’s the gravitational force that decides what we eat, what gets produced, and what companies make billions from.

You know how I know this? Because entire industries exist purely because they figured out how to make food taste incredible, with no other redeemable attributes other than their taste. Chips, energy drinks, candy—these products don’t keep you healthy or feed you efficiently. They have little to contribute to a healthier agricultural system. Yet they exist because food scientists cracked the code on making your brain crave them. And it works. These companies rake in billions by hitting our pleasure buttons just right.

If junk food can build empires on taste alone, imagine what we could do with food that actually serves us.

The Business of Bliss

Every ingredient in a bag of chips is there for one reason: to trigger your reward system as hard as possible. Food scientists call these “bliss points“—the perfect mix of salt, fat, sugar, and crunch that makes your brain say “more.”

Companies making healthier or more sustainable foods face a different challenge. They’re working so hard on the nutrition, the sourcing, the environmental impact, that they can run out of bandwidth to make their products truly irresistible.

Many of these companies get so caught up in their metrics and mission that they lose objectivity about how their product tastes. They delude themselves into thinking their product is more delicious than it actually is. There’s almost an implicit assumption that the nutrition label or sustainable certifications it bears will get eaters to overlook that the thing might actually taste like shit. The result? Products that check all the right boxes on paper but fail the most basic test—do people actually want to eat them?

It’s noble to make food that’s healthy and sustainable, but the average eater can’t taste nobility. They need flavor. We need more brutal honesty about how our food tastes. Especially for the foods that are trying to create positive impact on the health of people and planet. Because if those aren’t also the foods that people crave, then that brand’s impact will never be realized. Flavor is the key to unlocking that impact.

The success of junk food actually shows us the path forward. Flavor isn’t the enemy of healthy eating—it’s the secret weapon we’re not using enough. Instead of fighting our love of delicious food, we should be making healthy food irresistible.

Breeding for Flavor

Dan Barber’s Row 7 Seed Company exemplifies this approach. By breeding vegetables primiarly for flavor first, Row 7 is doing what I think is one of the most important efforts in food today—closing the gap between artificially flavored junk food and real food.

The produce industry has spent decades inadvertently breeding the flavor out of basic vegetables to make them more compatible with the demands of industrial food supply chains. Carrots, potatoes, salad greens—most of what you find in supermarkets has been selected for everything except taste. Is it any wonder kids still have trouble eating their vegetables? We’ve created a food system where a bag of chips delivers more flavor excitement than a carrot and it doesn’t need to be that way.

Remember the first time you tried an in-season, heirloom tomato? I do. It completely scrambled my brain about the theoretical flavor potential of common produce. I felt like I was lied to by the mass tomato industry about how good these things could taste.That first bite was a revelation—sweet, acidic, and startlingly complex, as if I’d been eating tomato-flavored water my whole life. It made me think: what other foods had I been gaslit into accepting?

And how lucky was I to even discover this, when so many people go through life never knowing that vegetables don’t have to taste as bland as the specimens lining supermarket shelves? Of course, it’s not practical for everyone to spend $8 on an heirloom tomato—I get that this sounds like privileged foodie nonsense.

But what if we put the same energy into making vegetables irresistible that we put into perfecting snack foods? What impact would we have on the world getting people to eat more vegetables and fruits by showing them more delicious versions of things they didn’t think could be delicious? Imagine how much we could do to convince people to eat more real food if they understood there was a better, more delicious option waiting for them.

The Twilight of Universal Taste

It’s really hard to try and imagine what a critical mass of people can agree on is delicious anymore. In our increasingly fragmented society—split by culture, class, geography, and digital echo chambers—can we even create flavors that almost everyone agrees taste good? Flavor is so subjective and can often be altered by circumstance, mood, atmosphere, story, context, and a thousand other variables. This requires stepping outside your own taste preferences and imagining what deliciousness means to people from different backgrounds, with different genetics, different food histories.

A spice that seems mild to someone used to fresh, high-quality ingredients might taste intense to someone raised on processed food. Products designed for mass appeal often disappoint people looking for more complex flavors. The challenge is creating food that bridges these different flavor worlds without dumbing everything down to the lowest common denominator—but maybe that challenge is becoming impossible.

If this is true, then the basic assumption of Big Food—create standardized food for the masses—might be fundamentally eroding. Is it becoming a fool’s errand to try to make everyone happy? Perhaps the smarter play is to superserve the people we know who will really like something and forget about being everything to everyone. This shift is already slowly happening in our grocery store aisles, with endless micro-targeted products for specific dietary needs, cultural preferences, and lifestyle tribes.

But I wonder: could anyone create a company today from scratch with as much mass flavor appeal as Coca-Cola once had? Or are we living in the twilight of universal taste, where the future belongs not to products that unite us, but to those that divide us into ever-smaller, more satisfied tribes?

Making Virtue Irresistible

We’re facing huge challenges in the food system: climate change, public health crises, food security. Flavor is the key that unlocks the innate potential of any food to address these problems. The most promising food innovations aren’t asking people to sacrifice pleasure for virtue—they’re making virtuous choices more pleasurable.

Consider the groundbreaking work that Mette Johnsen, CEO of Spora, described in our interview. Spora is a global food research center that emerged from Copenhagen’s revolutionary restaurant Alchemist, bridging avant-garde gastronomy with food science. Her team tackled the 80 million tons of rapeseed cake left over annually after oil extraction—a protein-rich waste stream that looks “more like something you feed a rabbit” and tastes intensely bitter due to compounds that suppress nutrient absorption.

Through fermentation, they transformed this industrial byproduct into what Johnsen calls a “gold standard protein” that’s as nutritionally valuable as soy. The result is a versatile meat alternative that can be formed into burger patties, used in bolognese, or incorporated into spring salads now served at Alchemist.

While Alchemist itself remains a rarified dining experience—accessible to only a privileged few due to cost and location—operations like Spora represent something far more significant: innovation sandboxes where extensive resources and world-class talent can identify patterns of deliciousness that could eventually reach mainstream food channels. The same fermentation techniques perfecting rapeseed protein for Copenhagen’s culinary elite could one day inform products sold at McDonald’s or Walmart. These high-end laboratories serve as proving grounds for flavor breakthroughs that, once refined, can be scaled and democratized.

This illustrates a crucial principle: without solving the fundamental flavor problem first—making something genuinely delicious that people would choose repeatedly—the enormous potential for converting massive waste streams into human food could never have been realized. As Johnsen puts it, they put “deliciousness first” as the essential vehicle for sustainable food choices.

Everyone in the food industry says “it’s gotta taste good,” but how many are actually successful at doing that? The gap between intention and execution is enormous. Too many companies are in denial about how their products really taste compared to what’s already winning in the marketplace.

Sustainable foods won’t win through guilt trips alone—they have to win in the arena of immediate satisfaction. The most exciting food tech focuses on unlocking new flavors that were previously impossible: fermentation that creates entirely new tastes from food waste, growing techniques that concentrate flavor compounds, processing that preserves the sensory qualities usually lost in mass production.

These approaches recognize that flavor isn’t frivolous—it’s the fundamental force that determines which foods survive. Products that taste better don’t just sell better, they reshape eating patterns and ultimately determine the direction of our entire food system.

This essay was inspired by a conversation about The Future of Flavor on The Tomorrow Today Show, featuring host Mike Lee with guest co-host Ali Bouzari (food scientist and co-founder of Pilot R&D), Mario Ubiali (Founder of Thimus), Ori Zohar (Co-founder of Burlap & Barrel), and Mette Johnsen (CEO of Spora).

This post was originally published on Mike Lee’s wonderfully written and informational substack. You can find the post here. You should subscribe!

And you know what? You should also definitely subscribe to Mike’s new podcast, The Tomorrow Today Show, from the Spoon Podcast Network. You can listen to this episode about flavor below.

September 19, 2018

Aromyx’s “Camera for Taste and Smell” Can Digitize Flavor

Have you ever wondered just exactly what mystical combination of ingredients made Coca-Cola have that distinct Coca-Cola taste?

The secret may be locked up in a heavily-guarded safe somewhere (at least that’s how I picture it), but Aromyx could probably tell you nonetheless. Based in Palo Alto, California, Aromyx is a tech company that uses a combination biochip/software system to digitize smell and taste.

To find out the flavor breakdown of, well, anything, scientists put tiny samples of the product into wells on a disposable biochip (called “the EssenceChip”) which contains olfactory receptors cloned from the human nose and tongue. A plate reader will extract data from the samples, which Aromyx’s Allegory Software Toolkit can then interpret to translate into easily digestible (ha) graphs showing the breakdown of smell and taste for whatever substance is in the EssenceChip.

In simpler terms, Aromyx’s promotional video (see below) describes the chip as “a camera for taste and smell” which can take an olfactory snapshot of any food or drink.

Today Aromyx debuted a new feature to their Allegory Software Toolkit. Dubbed Magic Search, the tool can dissect the EssenceChip’s olfactory measurements into distinct receptor responses. In human speak, that means that it can break down every scent that goes into a given product — and, since we know that smell is 80 percent of taste, Magic Search can essentially outline every possible ingredient combination that would create a particular flavor.

Though I’m clearly no flavor scientist, I could imagine this technology being used to “hack” the secret ingredients in popular CPG brands’ signature products. With Aromyx’s tech, CPG companies could easily sub out ingredients to capitalize on taste trends — such as plant-based, natural, or non-GMO food — without sacrificing taste. The company can also help suppliers compare product samples to make sure that product batches are chemically identical and, thus, consistent.

The digitization of food is a quickly-evolving space in food tech. Japanese company OpenMeals is creating a digital food platform which will allow people to 3D print any food they please, from sushi to pizza. Foodpairing creates digital flavor maps that help chefs predict which ingredients will go well together.

According to Crunchbase, Aromyx has raised $5.8 million in funding from venture capital firms as well as Stanford University. If you’re wondering what that smell is, it might be the future of digitized flavor — but Aromyx can tell you for sure.

August 17, 2018

The Future of Flavor (Part I)

In this two-part series, guest contributor Chiara Cecchini explores how flavor may be understood, perceived, and valued in the future, based on insights gained from speaking with industry experts. Part I is more focused on the food system, while Part II delves into new flavor profiling technologies employing big data and AI.

The produce of today is being engineered for color, shape, yield, and shelf life, but it seems like the produce of the future will be optimized for flavor. Horticultural sciences professor Harry Klee is currently breeding a tomato for taste, based on analysis of flavor compounds in heirloom, wild, and modern tomatoes. This endeavor involved sequencing the genomes of over 400 tomato varieties, but his efforts also encompass part of a larger goal. Klee hopes that by understanding the chemical and genetic makeup of flavor in fruits and vegetables we can control the synthesis of flavor compounds and create better-tasting food.

In an age where the average supermarket tomato is watery and lackluster and where the generic pea no longer tastes like spring or the earth, an increased focus on flavor from the production side is most welcome. Peter Klosse, author of The Essence of Gastronomy: Understanding the Flavor of Foods and Beverages, asserts that this change may be driven by consumers’ frustrations with flavorless foods.  “Gradually, we’ve grown to changing our traditional agricultural systems to produce flavorless commodities,” Klosse states; according to Harry Klee in “Improving the flavor of fresh fruits: genomics, biochemistry, and biotechnology“, it is now generally accepted that the flavor quality of many fruits has significantly declined over recent decades. But blandness of products does not seem an issue because the food industry has found a way to solve the problem. This is done by incorporating salt, sugar, fats, and chemical additives to restore flavor that has been bred out of food.

Ultimately, a lack of value for produce’s flavor is where it all starts. Supermarkets, focused on getting food from producers to consumers in the most efficient, least costly means possible, want a consistent supply of consistent quality food. And while several food-tech companies are populating the market trying to provide solutions to meet this needs, Corporate farms, urged to meet industry demands, are forced to sacrifice seasonality and sustainability — and consequently, flavor.

“We have lost biodiversity,” Klosse says. “We have lost a lot of individual quality between farms and regions, we are losing varietal differences.” But consumers are starting to notice, and starting to care. Klosse believes innovation in this field should be focused on moving the food system towards regenerative agriculture.

Regenerative systems, involving maintaining biodiversity and using farming techniques that do not damage soil, are also flavor-rich. Food production today emphasizes efficiency and yield; but if the value of flavor — and subsequently the possibility of earning money by cultivating flavorful produce — is reintroduced, farmers can once again grow foods that are both flavorful and sustainable.

Klee’s research articulates the benefits of the older, more natural agricultural practices which Klosse promotes. His team has discovered that modern tomatoes lack the sweetness and rich flavors of heirloom breeds since flavor compounds have been lost over time; bred out as the genes responsible for producing the volatile flavor chemicals are neglected. Supermarket tomatoes are picturesque, hefty globes of firm red flesh. But bite into one and you’ll find that the tanginess, earthiness, and succulent sweetness associated with tomatoes are, well, absent. Beyond replicating Klee’s experiments by taste-testing a variety of tomatoes, Klosse claims we need palpable proof of concept for a regenerative system to convince the industry of its merits.

In short: we need real examples which you can see and touch. “Start small,” he suggests, “take a comprehensive region within the industry, from farmers to retail to consumers, committed to a new way of thinking, and demonstrate that regenerative systems work.”  In my opinion, if more people come to realize that said systems do in fact work, the food system of tomorrow may be one that combines future understandings and research on flavor compound interactions with past ecologically-friendly practices. If what we believe about flavor becoming increasingly prioritized by producers and consumers holds true, then the future of food is a truly appetizing one which we should look forward to.

Additional insights and contributions to this article were made by Audrey Chen


As with smart kitchens, the potential of technology and big data will be harnessed to provide product development solutions. To see two how innovations in digital flavor profiling and AI-powered analytics are revolutionizing the way companies and consumers alike view flavor, check back soon on The Spoon for the second installation of The Future of Flavor.

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