The Big Cheese and Beyond

June 2001

The Big Cheese and Beyond

By Bruce FlickingerContributing Editor

The story of extruded savory snacks in the United States, for the most part, is a story of corn-based cheese balls, cheese puffs and cheese curls. Certainly, product developers continue to tinker with shapes and colors, and some companies have dabbled in nontraditional bases, such as potato or rice, but the experimentation remains relatively conservative. And any forays into flavor territories beyond the bastion of cheese typically are found in test-market products and are nowhere near as far afield as the palette of products available in markets in Europe and Asia.Part of this is due to Americans’ predilection for cheese. However, “Cheese is not such a big seller in other parts of the world as it is here,” says Tom Rieman, business marketing manager, Kraft Food Ingredients Corp., Memphis, TN. “In the United States, people are always looking for the next big flavor and there really aren’t any that have evolved.” However, in other parts of the world, snacks with meat and cuttlefish flavors, as well as extruded products using prawn-based matrices, line supermarket shelves.Sweet and savory successesAs such, Rieman and others point to tremendous opportunity for expanded corn-based extruded snacks utilizing different flavors. One area with measurable activity is sweet snacks, and several cereal manufacturers recently have introduced products in this category. “A significant number of breakfast cereals are eaten in a snack mode, and there is a natural similarity between bases,” says Don Williams, vice president of flavor design and development, McCormick & Company Inc., Hunt Valley, MD. “There’s good marketplace activity here, but most adults still prefer a salty snack.” Most of the offerings to date in this category have been kid-oriented products.Rieman also sees opportunity for sweet, cereal-type snacks, but says it calls for a consumer education effort. “The question is how to deliver this as a snack and not a breakfast food that we snack on,” he says. “The products need to be repackaged and reinvented to differentiate them from consumer expectations of cereal.”In the savory-flavors arena — where sour cream and onion, and barbecue join cheese to round out the triumvirate of best sellers — experimentation continues, most notably by regional manufacturers. Most companies use the “flavor-of-the-month” approach, taking a successful base product and introducing a series of flavor variations with the goal of encouraging the consumer to sample newer wares when picking up the standard. If repeat sales are promising enough, then the item could get a more permanent spot in the product line.Low-fat snacks present an opportunity for those who want to take a flavor excursion. First, avoid frying with a cook-extruded product made with a denser texture and then apply a cooked or fried note. “So if you’re selling against someone’s fried product, you can put yourself at an advantage because, by eliminating the frying step, your processing costs will be lower,” Rieman says.Inside storyOne issue with many savory flavors is that greater flavor impact than that needed with cheese must be formulated into a product “to deliver the promise,” Rieman says. “With a bacon flavor, for example, consumers have clear expectations, and if the flavor impact is too mild, they’re going to have difficulty with it.” But, he says, “you don’t want an overpowering flavor, because you don’t want to satiate the urge immediately,” though this is not an overriding concern with smaller snack packs.An internal flavor system sometimes can achieve a more balanced, amenable profile by augmenting a topical seasoning or replacing it. Internal flavor ingredients may be a complementary flavor or could be one inherent to the base, such as extra corn or potato flavor. However, when flavors are placed in the dough, even if their compositions remain relatively intact, the perception is muted vs. an oil-based topical product that immediately hits the taste buds.In addition, using internal flavor systems, either alone or in tandem with coated flavorings, continues to be extremely difficult in extruded products. Work has been done injecting the flavor at the very end of the extrusion process, but even there, much of the flavor tends to flash-off with the moisture. “Every year there seems to be somebody looking at doing internal flavors, but it’s difficult to get a reproducible system this way,” Williams says. “Extruded products are cooked to very low moisture levels and it’s difficult to have flavor fidelity in that sort of environment.” Heat can completely distill-off all or part of the flavor notes, depending on the individual compounds’ boiling points, leaving either no flavor or merely an unbalanced one.The right noteThe steam involved in extrusion “diminishes the system and creates imbalances,” says Eric Johnson, director of R&D, Edlong Flavors, Elk Grove Village, IL. “You lose the highly volatile front notes and, in the case of a cheese product, the protein notes are left behind. The overall profile tends to be off.”But heat isn’t all bad when it comes to flavor. Johnson says the pyrazines that are developed when the grain bases are cooked can be exploited, notably with cheese or buttery, popcorn-type flavors. “Pyrazines are created by heating and are less volatile, and tend to have heat stability,” he says. “They are characterized by a roasted note that is well-complemented by cheese or butter flavors. The notes created by the different bases aren’t necessarily a negative characteristic. We tend to go with them and come up with a profile that complements them.”One area of opportunity for those interested in internal flavors is using newer supercritical-fluid-extrusion techniques. Here, instead of using steam, a supercritical fluid, typically CO2, permits expanded products to be manufactured at temperatures below 100°C. This allows the simultaneous low-temperature mixing of flavors and other heat-sensitive ingredients, such as vitamins or colors.Still, manufacturers typically apply flavors after the extrusion process, either as a dust adhered by frying oil (or a carbohydrate-based concoction for calorie reduction), or a slurried product. Cost is a key parameter because the seasonings are the most expensive ingredients. “We work interactively with customers to manipulate the seasonings to get an acceptable flavor profile, but we also want to assure a practical commercial product,” Williams says. “So we look at processibility, performance in plant and in product, and that the price value is where it needs to be.”

Bruce Flickinger is a freelance writer specializing in the food and pharmaceutical sciences. He can be reached at [email protected].

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