Screening for Successful Flavor

Beyond offering flavors from almond to zucchini and everything in between, Gold Coast Ingredients, Inc., provides a flavor prescreening service to all of its clients. This saves customers time and logistical headaches, and helps ensure a successful finished product.

“With the process of approximating the matrix of a client’s product, we can taste several varieties of flavors and determine which meets the customer’s criteria or creates a superior product,” says Michele Trent, corporate sales manager.

Since no two formulations are exactly alike, this service process essentially customizes existing flavors to meet specific needs. For a fortified, high-intensity sweetened soy protein drink that needed traditional, dairy, shake-like vanilla, strawberry and chocolate flavors, for example, Gold Coast Ingredients’ R&D team worked first to mask the sharpness of the sweeteners, the protein characteristics, and the vitamins and minerals.

“Each client’s ratio of these ingredients varies, so one masking agent does not work universally well,” Trent says. “Masking agents must be tailored to the client’s product before the flavor work begins.” Next, the team worked to make the base taste like milk, or ice cream. The final step was to flavor the product to the required specifications and ensure there was no aftertaste.

“Sometimes, prototypes may need adjustments to the formulation before the flavor will achieve what the customer wants,” Trent notes. “In this case, we may suggest modifying some of the product’s other ingredients to help achieve these goals.”

The Gold Coast Ingredients team can even prescreen flavors without having access to the complete formulation. “Many clients wish to maintain some secrecy concerning their product or process,” Trent says. “In these cases, they will give us two to three parameters, such as Brix, pH and perhaps the end product. We utilize this information to find flavors that we think will hit the client’s criteria.”

According to Trent, there is a great deal of serendipity in the process of flavor screening and development. “Many times, we have worked on flavors for a client and created a unique new flavor,” she says, which makes it a win-win process for everyone involved.

“Many companies offer application testing and prototype development for only their top accounts,” Trent notes. “But Gold Coast Ingredients tries to offer this type of service to any client that can benefit from it.” 

Gold Coast Ingredients, Inc.
2429 Yates Avenue 
Commerce, CA 90040-1917 
Phone: 800/352-8673 
Website: www.goldcoastinc.com