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Toasty, sweet, and luscious in texture, caramel is often a welcome addition to any cheese plate or dessert. It is an incredibly complex tasting ingredient, requiring the perfect temperature and cooking process to achieve the bold flavor and silky texture caramel is often known for. As it is a profoundly complex and endlessly customizable ingredient, caramel is an excellent candidate for pairing with wine — The question is, what wine should you choose? From heady reds to crisp whites and even a couple of bubbly options, plenty of wines to serve alongside your next caramel confection are sure to match anyone’s palate.

How is Caramel Made?

One of the most popular flavors to add to a dessert, caramel is an excellent ingredient most commonly prepared as a sauce or hard candy. Although the process can be intense and vigorous, the steps to making caramel are simple.

Put simply, caramel is sugar that has been caramelized, the process by which sugar darkens, melts, and develops its well-celebrated caramel flavor. Either by dissolving in a small amount of water (A “wet” caramel) or by melting down dry sugar (a “dry” caramel), table sugar can be melted into a clear syrup that will darken and gain an amber color over time. Without adding any extra ingredients, a pure sugar caramel is ideal for desserts like French croquembouche or Korean tanghulu, highlighting the hard, shattery texture of a sugar caramel.

Otherwise, confectioners may add dairy to a caramel in the form of butter, milk, or cream. These dairy products add richness, buttery-ness, and thickness to the caramel, turning it from a shattering hard candy to a soft and silky sauce or malleable candy, depending on how long it is cooked down. Further, caramel makers may add salt, flavor extracts, and a variety of other additions to make their caramel uniquely flavored and specially designed for the dessert it will be served with.

What Wines to Pair with the Flavor Notes in Caramel

Like all other foods and desserts, the tastes and flavors present in caramel are referred to as “flavor notes.” Identifying and highlighting these flavor notes are great ways to understand what you are tasting, enabling you to decide what wine to pair with caramel.

Sweet – Tawny Port

The sweetness in caramel is thick, syrupy, and heavy, leaving a rich taste on your palate. This sweetness is different from the sweetness of fruit or candy, with its well-developed darkness and unctuousness. A Tawny Port can be a great pairing to support this robust and bold sweetness. A bit more subtle than its Vintage Port counterpart, Tawny Ports features a sharpness and fruitiness that will cut through the lingering richness of a caramel dessert but still highlight caramel’s deep, syrupy sweetness with notes of dried fruit and chocolate.

Toasty – Malbec

Caramel is more than just a sweet addition to desserts. The dark toastiness of a well-developed caramel can often evoke flavors of crème brûlée and toasted marshmallow, leaving a sharp and delightfully pungent note that pairs well with Malbec wines. Notable for its deep toastiness, Malbec wines tend to have notes of dried fruit and wood smoke, highlighting the heavy, darker flavors in your caramel and offering a sharpness and dryness that will counteract any lingering pungency.

Nutty – Riesling

An often overlooked note of dessert caramels, caramel usually has a fatty, earthy, and creamy quality similar to nuts on the palate. Riesling wine can be an excellent option to complement caramel’s creamy and fatty notes. A bright, sharp, and juicy white wine, Rieslings will cut through caramel’s fatty and thick texture with its acidic and fruity flavor, offering a refreshing contrast to the bold and developed caramel flavors.

Buttery – Nebbiolo

The dairy and creamy qualities of caramel can’t be overlooked, especially when caramel is added to a dairy dessert like ice cream, caramel pot de crème, or a caramel pecan pie. For red wine lovers, a Nebbiolo wine is an excellent selection for this quality, as it is rich, tannic, and has a fair bit of acidity. Nebbiolo wines will fare well against the buttery, concentrated flavor of caramel, offering a sharp and acidic flavor that balances the punchiness of caramel and finishes with a dry, clean palate that is ready to pair again.

Salty – Brut

Salted caramel is a regular favorite of many dessert lovers, offering small bursts of salt that shine against the bold sweetness of caramel. Brut wines can be a solid pairing for salted caramel in particular, encompassing a variety of dry, bubbly wines like Champagne, Cava, and other similar wines. Bruts work particularly well with caramel, as the wine’s dry bubbliness and light sweetness offer a refreshing, clean note that effortlessly balances any heavy caramel flavors, imparting a slight fruitiness that highlights the sweet and nutty notes natural to the caramel.

Many Ways to Enjoy Caramel

The flavor of a food isn’t all about how it tastes — it’s also about the texture and pairing of other flavors in the dish. Consider how you are serving your wine, whether alongside a meal or a grazing board and choose the caramel form to best serve alongside it! Caramel sauces are ideal for cheese and fruit boards, as they can be easily drizzled or dipped without getting your hands dirty. Caramel candies can be an easy addition to a grazing tray and are slightly sweeter than other caramels. Regardless of which form of caramel you choose, your next dessert dish will indeed be elevated by the specialty wine you’ve selected to serve alongside it.

From home-cooked meals to mass-produced confections, flavors occur naturally in all foods. Many people know the seven basic tastes — Sweet, salty, sour, spicy, bitter, umami, and fatty. These basic tastes are just representations of the thousands upon thousands of flavor compounds found in any food. These flavor compounds — with names like vanillin, benzaldehyde, and ethyl acetate — may sound like chemicals in a science experiment, but are the pure chemicals that cause “flavor” on your tongue. Humans have studied flavors for centuries, leading to a database and organization for the many flavors we encounter regularly. While it is a complicated and dense field of study, understanding what makes food flavorful can be pretty straightforward.

What is in a Flavor?

If flavors occur naturally in all food, what are they made of, and how are they created? What makes a natural flavor unique vs. an artificial flavor, or an organic flavor? 

According to the Flavor Extract Manufacturers Association (FEMA), flavors are considered the “entire range of sensations we perceive when we eat a food or drink a beverage,” leaving flavor as a rather broad category. With this definition, the flavor can include the taste, texture, perceived temperature (as with chili’s heat or mint’s cooling sensation), or even dryness (as with tannins in wine and coffee). The flavor contains a broad spectrum of effects, so flavorists and chemists have derived categories or organized and quantified specific flavor compounds and the impact they can impart to a food product.

Natural vs. Artificial Flavors

“Natural” and “Artificial” flavors are terms derived by food chemists to specify the design and creation process of a particular flavor compound. While all flavors in food can be distilled from their natural source to a specific chemical or set of compounds, not all flavors have to be derived from the natural ingredient.

According to FEMA, natural flavors are “ingredients that come from natural sources,” typically a fruit, vegetable, plant, or animal product. While different countries may have varying definitions of what is considered a “natural flavor,” it is required to meet the FEMA and FDA requirements to be labeled as a natural flavor in the United States. For example, vanillin — the compound behind vanilla flavor — can be processed as a natural flavor derived from real vanilla bean pods. Conversely, acetanisol — a vanillin alternative — is derived from beaver products but can still be considered a natural flavor.

Artificial flavors, on the other hand, are any flavoring that doesn’t meet the guidelines to be an artificial flavor. While the flavor compound’s structure may be identical to its natural flavor counterpart and may taste the same in food, artificial flavors are designated as such because the source of the flavors is not a plant or animal product. For example, vanillin can be derived naturally from vanilla beans. Still, the same chemical of vanillin can be artificially produced in a lab or made even more vanilla-y as with ethyl vanillin. Since neither artificial vanillin nor ethyl vanillin is derived from a natural source, they must be labeled as “artificial flavors.”

Natural vs Organic Flavors

When defining a flavor in food as “natural” or “organic,” things become a little more complicated. Other countries may have varying guidelines or governing bodies to manage their organic foods, but in the United States, these guidelines are overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). For a flavor to be labeled “organic,” it must meet the FDA definition of a natural flavor. It must not use synthetic solvents, carrier systems (the substance the flavor contains, like alcohol), or artificial preservatives. This information, as outlined in the USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP), provides clear and accessible guidelines for designing and distributing organic flavors. In addition to the requirements for production, the NOP also designates several “incidental additives” that typically show up when producing natural flavors that cannot be in an organic flavor, such as propylene glycol, mono/diglycerides, polysorbate 80, and more.

All in all, organic flavors are not very different from the natural flavors you typically find in food ingredient lists, but they do require a more careful and specific production process to meet the proper guidelines and exclude unwanted compounds.

Use Cases for Natural, Artificial, and Organic Flavors

Now that the different kinds of flavors in food are established, why would you choose natural or artificial flavors over organic flavors?

For one, there is a cost consideration. Due to the extensive process of producing natural or organic flavors, they often cost more than their artificial counterparts. This can be an essential consideration for manufacturers who make food at scale and typically seek to produce the most food for the lowest cost. The increased cost of using natural or organic flavors in food can take its toll, mainly when making thousands of units daily.

Using derived flavors also enables food manufacturers to design their food products deeply. The journey of taste can be altered by having a punchy burst of flavor initially or allowing the flavor to linger slightly, encouraging the consumer to savor the product for longer. Flavors can also assist with making a product taste as it should after it has been treated in other ways, such as the pasteurization process, which can lower the intensity and volatility of the naturally occurring flavors on a product.

Whatever flavoring you use can be instrumental in designing the perfect product. From covering up health additives to highlighting sweetness or acidity in a product or simply adding a little “oomph” to the flavor mix, natural, artificial, and organic flavors alike can make all the difference when included in a food recipe.

One of the most popular flavors in the world, Vanilla is a taste and aroma found worldwide in confections, dairy products, perfumes, and even candles. In addition to its rich, sweet, buttery qualities, the gamut of body and mental health benefits that occur naturally in vanilla have also long been celebrated. Though it is typically used as an extract or flavor additive, these beneficial compounds are retained in the product, resulting in excellent-tasting vanilla products that are still healthy for you.

Where is Vanilla Produced?

Vanilla flavor is typically extracted from the vanilla bean, which grows as long green pods on the vanilla orchid, also called Vanilla planifolia. This plant was initially discovered by the Totonac Indians in Mexico, cultivated primarily for its flavor and medicinal uses. Thanks to the Melipona bee, local orchids could be pollinated, resulting in vanilla pods that could be grown for health benefits and consumption.

The pollination of the Melipona bee would be a stopgap to the spread of vanilla for several centuries. Though Spanish explorers attempted to spread the vanilla orchid throughout the world, the lack of a suitable pollinator resulted in beautiful-looking flowers but no vanilla pods. This changed when hand-pollination methods were developed in Réunion, Madagascar, allowing farmers to produce vanilla pods on a scale never seen before, using specialized techniques to promote more robust, healthy, and flavorful vanilla pods. These methods, including various curing processes, are still used today to grow and cultivate your recipes’ most healthy and delicious vanilla.

How is Vanilla Prepared?

There are several preparation methods to extract the many health benefits present in vanilla, ranging from separating seeds to alcohol extraction. Before any processing, however, vanilla pods must be aged and dried in a controlled environment, developing the satisfying, concentrated flavor and dark color we typically associate with vanilla. After this aging process, vanilla beans can be processed in several ways:

Seeds

Hundreds to thousands of tiny black seeds are contained within each vanilla bean. A significant amount of vanilla flavor is held within these seeds, which can be separated from the husk and sieved to achieve a uniform flavoring agent that performs well in dry baked goods, flavoring sugar, or syrups. These seeds are also typically used for vanilla paste.

Specks

After the seeds are separated from the husk, the exhausted pods are dried, sterilized, and ground into a powder to mimic the appearance of vanilla seeds at a lower cost. Specks are slightly less concentrated in flavor but full of vanilla aromas and health benefits.

Ground Beans

Ground beans are of the highest quality and select vanilla beans. These select beans are ground into a thick paste traditionally used for chocolate manufacturing, such as chocolate bars, truffles, or dessert cakes.

Extracts

The most common type of vanilla flavoring, whole vanilla pods or exhausted husks, are soaked in an alcohol solution, extracting the volatile aromatic compounds from the vanilla bean and infusing it into the alcohol. Over time, the vanilla will lose more and more of its flavor compounds, making for a more complex and developed vanilla flavor. Vanilla extracts can be distilled in several ways, including wooden casks, unique alcohols like bourbon or rum, and even specialized vanilla bean pods. Regardless of the extraction ingredients used, however, the health benefits vanilla is coveted for are retained.

How Is Vanilla Healthy for You?

The effects of vanilla have been well understood for centuries, with some of the first civilizations using vanilla in medicines, foods, and tinctures. However, the compounds that make vanilla effective have only been understood recently.

The secret behind vanilla’s health benefits lies in vanillin, the aromatic plant compound that occurs naturally in vanilla plants. While it is present in high concentrations in vanilla beans, it can also be extracted in smaller amounts from foods like rice bran or clove and produced synthetically in lab environments. Regardless of its production method, vanillin has many positive effects on the body, ranging from digestive to circulatory and mental health benefits.

Digestive Benefits of Vanilla

Vanillin provides several positive effects on the digestive system, primarily through its impact on acid production. Vanilla can help regulate gastric acid production and reduce bloating or stomach pain when consumed.

Circulatory Benefits of Vanilla

Like coffee and tea, Vanilla is relatively high in antioxidants, aiding circulatory health and soothing minor heart symptoms. Primarily, antioxidants are effective at regulating the concentration of free radicals in the body, which can contribute to heart diseases and cancer.

Mental Health Benefits of Vanilla

Vanillin is effective for promoting mental health, both as aromatherapy and when ingested. The taste and smell of vanillin have been proven to encourage serotonin production in the brain, reduce heart rates, and soothe symptoms of anxiety, all of which make vanilla great for your mental health — even treating symptoms that arise from anxiety or depression.

Make the Most of Your Vanilla

Metarom USA is a world-class flavor manufacturer and distributor with excellent and healthy vanilla options for your recipes. Select from liquid extracts, seeds, and various other suspensions, making it simple to add our natural and rich vanilla flavor to any baked good, beverage, confection, or other product! Contact us today to get access to our best-in-class flavorists and flavor chemists, who have decades of combined experience to assist with your flavor needs.

When keeping a healthy diet, flavor shouldn’t be a secondary consideration. Protein bars, low-calorie snacks, and workout supplements tend to put function over flavor, leaving you with bland, uninteresting, or unappetizing food products. For functional foods that promote a particular lifestyle, flavor modulation can be an excellent way to manipulate the flavor of a product to be more appealing, flavorful, and healthy.

From blocking bitter receptors to enhancing sweetness receptors and even including unique and custom-designed flavor extracts, there are many tools to enable recipe producers to create the exact product they are looking for.

What is Flavor Modulation?

All food and drink has a flavor — some good, some bad, but all incredibly complex. Flavors are typically composed of various aromatic and tasteful “flavor compounds,” chemicals in many different foods and drinks that make food items taste a particular way. Vanillin, for example, carries the flavor of vanilla but is also present in many other food ingredients, providing a slight vanilla note and aroma. Benzaldehyde, conversely, offers a less specific woody and rich note and is frequently used for almond, cherry, and apricot flavorings.

With flavor modulation, distinct flavors can be derived from their real-world counterparts to get a clarified and faithful representation of the organic product, enabling flavor chemists to take complete control over the flavors they design. Combined with health foods, these flavors can help create the perfect product that tastes great without compromising functionality.

What is Functional Food?

Functional foods are food and drinks primarily designed to serve a particular dietary purpose. Rather than empty calories and low-nutrition food options, functional food items are formulated to provide the body with additional nourishment, nutrients, or other crucial needs. Sometimes, these health-focused additives can affect the flavor of the food product, adding extra bitterness and diluting sweetness. In other cases, healthy additives cannot be added to the product due to compromising the recipe by changing ingredient ratios or cooking processes. These hurdles can be overcome through flavor modulation, which enables a wide variety of flavors to be incorporated into a product where they otherwise may require altering the recipe.

There are several options to incorporate flavor modulation into functional food recipes, each solving a unique issue in the production cycle:

Masking Agents

Masking agents enable flavor chemists to cover up and mask off-tasting flavors that provide nutritional benefits, such as vegan proteins, vitamins, oils, and acids. This masking is done either by modulating/altering the flavor sensation of an ingredient or suppressing the flavor of an ingredient, enabling the stronger and better-tasting sensations to shine through.

Bitter Blockers

Bitter blockers are specialized flavor modulation compounds built to block and minimize bitter flavors that can often be associated with common drink additives. This can include ingredients like caffeine and L-theanine, altered sugars like Stevia or aspartame, and even more natural supplements like amino acids. Bitter blockers work by directly neutralizing the bitter taste receptors on your tongue, preventing the bitter flavor compounds from activating the flavor response. This effect doesn’t alter flavor receptors in any way. It simply blocks out the bitter compounds present in the flavor mix of the product, enabling the more robust, more appetizing flavors to shine through.

Sweetness Enhancers

When making confections, beverages, or other recipes, sugar ratios can often be an important consideration — especially when seeking to create nutritious food or qualify for particular dietary guidelines. Sugar alternatives like aspartame or sucrose are options, but they come with specific flavors, among other health concerns for consumers.

Sweetness enhancers are an excellent way to pump up a recipe’s sweetness without adding extra sugar or relying on a sugar substitute. When used for flavor modulation, sweetness enhancers combine several complex flavor compounds to highlight the natural sweetness of ingredients in the product mix and add an extra punch of vibrant flavor to highlight the best parts of the recipe. These commonly sweet flavor extracts, from vanilla to caramel to fruity mixes, can shine without the nutritional burden.

Fat Replacers

Excess fat can be a health concern in many diets, and the ratio of fat to other ingredients in a recipe can be crucial to the flavor, texture, and look of a food product. Fat replacers eliminate these health or recipe concerns by offering a carbohydrate-based, protein-based, or alternative fat option to fit any dietary need.

Fat replacers are an advantageous method of flavor modulation, enabling recipe designers to maintain the mouthfeel and flavor of a product without compromising its healthiness or composition. Combined with the custom-designed flavors from Metarom, recipe producers are armed with many excellent tools to make the perfect product.

Functional Nutritional Supplements

While flavor modulation is typically about altering the taste and perception of functional foods, it is also concerned with the nutrition of these foods. Many nutritional supplements can be included in recipe mixes to make them healthier or to boost deficiencies that consumers might have, such as low vitamin or mineral counts. Many natural ingredients, such as ginger and echinacea, provide health benefits in various forms, which can also fall under the purview of flavor modulation.

Design Your Perfect Flavor

Metarom USA combines decades of food chemistry and nutrition experience to help recipe producers find the ingredients for their next dish worldwide. Offering flavor extracts in liquid and powdered forms, custom-designed caramels, and diet substitutions for any replacement needs, Metarom USA has just the flavor to make your next recipe pop. Speak with a flavorist to learn how Metarom will dedicate its skills to your product.

Food and drink development are about many things — health, calories, texture, and shelf life all play a critical role in the design of food products. Above all, however, flavor reigns supreme. Like other aspects of food, flavor can be curated and designed, a job typically performed by food and flavor chemists, also known as flavorists. While the design and production of flavor extracts and additives can be a seemingly dense subject, it isn’t challenging to understand the broad guidelines of what goes into everyday flavor chemistry.

What is Flavor Chemistry?

This school of science is a subset of organic chemistry, primarily concerned with the chemical components of flavors and smells in everyday food and drink. Flavor and food chemists, also known as flavorists, use various tools and processes to detect and define the chemicals that make up the tastes of foods and drinks we regularly enjoy, such as those in produce, beverages, and prepackaged goods. Flavorists are concerned with more than just flavor compounds, though — they are also integral to understanding how temperature, oxygen exposure, and different packaging styles can affect flavor and product quality over time. With nearly 90% of American grocery store products containing ingredients produced by flavorists, the science behind how your food tastes is a topic that is taken very seriously.

How is Flavor Chemistry Used?

The processes flavorists use are integral to refining and altering certain foods’ flavors. Typically, these alterations are made to turn bland or distasteful foods into something palatable or to balance out intense flavors in food and drinks. Health foods, for example, tend to be a common use-case for flavor alterations due to their typically low sugar and fat content. Chemists can add sweetness and richness substitutes to chemically balance and improve the flavor of various health foods that would otherwise be unpalatable or uninteresting.

Flavor chemistry is also vital in beverages such as soda, coffee, and juices. Different additives like bitter blockers, sweetness enhancers, and even supplement mixes can provide a variety of flavors and nutritional additives to create the perfect nutrient and flavor balance. This process would be much more challenging to do without flavor extracts.

Natural vs Artificial Flavorings

In flavor chemistry, taste is just a mixture of smell components and flavor molecules— even those in non-processed foods like fruit, vegetables, and other produce. Food and flavor chemists organize and declare the different chemicals in various foods and which additives are considered safe to consume. The Flavor Extract Manufacturer Association (FEMA) records these various flavor chemicals on the Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) List, which is then reported to the Federal Drug Administration. In addition to being registered as safe, these flavor components are organized into “Natural” and “Artificial” flavors.

Natural Flavors

Natural flavors are compounds isolated from plant material or animal products, such as fruit, roots, herbs, meat, or dairy. These flavors are typically distilled with alcohol, extracted as an essential oil, or prepared in several other processes.

Artificial Flavors

Artificial flavors are an umbrella term for any flavor not designated as natural, typically a lab-made flavor extract made by a food chemist. Even though these flavor compounds may be chemically identical to the compounds found in a natural flavor extract, their synthetic nature requires that they be organized differently for food safety.

Common Flavor Chemicals

Many unique and nuanced flavor compounds have been discovered and organized into the GRAS list with modern flavor chemistry techniques. Here are some you are probably already familiar with:

Vanillin

Vanilla flavor comes from the chemical vanillin and is commonly derived from alcohol-distilling vanilla bean pods. Since the complex flavors in vanilla are highly volatile, and vanilla can grow in minimal places, the supply of genuine vanilla extract can only sometimes meet the demand. Flavor chemistry brings a solution by producing highly authentic substitutes for the flavor — with many synthetic substitutes being chemically identical to naturally occurring vanilla.

Diacetyl and Acetoin

Diacetyl and acetoin are responsible for butter and dairy’s savory and slightly acidic flavor. Common in flavorings for popcorn, oil sprays, and other dairy-flavored products, diacetyl and acetoin typically develop as byproducts of the sugar fermentation process, such as in yogurt or buttermilk. In synthetic applications, these chemicals are produced through a process similar to a flavor-optimized dairy culture, though the flavoring must be listed as “artificial butter flavoring.”

Limonene

Limonene is the chemical behind the tart and sweet flavor of many citrus fruits, primarily lemon, oranges, limes, and grapefruit. Food and flavor chemists typically extract limonene as an essential oil through steam distillation. While flavor chemistry primarily ties limonene to citrus fruit, it is also found naturally in many plants, such as sumac, cedar trees, juniper bushes, and hemlock plants.

How to Use Flavor Extracts

Lacking a flavor chemistry degree shouldn’t stop you from experimenting with flavor extracts! From standard extracts like vanilla to more purpose-built extracts like citric acid, these flavor compounds and distillates can bring a special and unique layer to the flavor of any food item. These extracts can come in many suspensions, making them a perfect addition to any food or drink. From baking cakes to preparing beverage syrups and even confections, using flavor extracts in your recipe will surely provide a distinctive and nuanced flavor.

In all aspects of food development, taste, and health are the two hallmarks of great food. Although these two details may only sometimes meet, many recipe testers, food manufacturers, and chefs aim to find the perfect meeting place between flavor and nutrition. Low-fat products are one of the most common ways this is achieved in food manufacturing, and there are a large variety of solutions to make commonly fatty foods low-fat, whether for health or flavor balance purposes.

What is Fat?

Dietary fat is present in nearly all foods and is one of the primary macronutrients that the body needs to function, next to carbohydrates and proteins. Fats are much more calorically dense than carbohydrates but slow to digest due to their complex molecular structure. As such, eating large amounts of fat can lead to excess calories in the system that aren’t being used, potentially leading to weight gain. Fats aren’t so simple, however, and making a low-fat product means understanding just what dietary fats do for the product in the first place.

How Different Fats Affect Taste and Health

All in all, food has four major categories of dietary fat: Saturated fats, trans fats, Monounsaturated fats, and polyunsaturated fats. These fats represent a unique chemical structure, leading to unique physical properties.

Saturated Fats

Saturated fats come from animal products, such as beef, pork, full-fat dairy, and eggs. Saturated fats can also be found in tropical oils like coconut or palm oil! Saturated fats are typically solid at room temperature, commonly called “solid fats.” Saturated fats are frequently connected to high cholesterol levels, and unmonitored or excessive consumption of saturated fats can lead to heart conditions.

Trans Fats

Trans fats are naturally occurring and artificial, with most trans fats found in processed hydrogenated oils. Due to their inexpensive and straightforward-to-produce qualities, trans fats are frequently added into processed foods as a flavorful and affordable fat, though often they can end up being little more than filler. Trans fats are commonly connected to high cholesterol levels and risk for type 2 diabetes, so consumption of them should be minimal. No low-fat product should contain trans fats or saturated fats.

Monounsaturated Fats

Monounsaturated fats are one of the healthier fats, named for their single unsaturated carbon bond at the molecular level. These fats and oils are typically liquid at room temperature and turn solid when chilled, much like olive oil, canola oil, or peanut oil. Unlike saturated and trans fats, monounsaturated fats are both tasty and healthy, helping to reduce harmful cholesterol levels and being high in Vitamin E, essential for clearing the body of toxins.

Polyunsaturated Fats

Polyunsaturated fats are much like their counterpart but with more than one unsaturated carbon bond at the molecular level. Oils in the polyunsaturated fat category include soybean oil, fish oil, and corn oil, and are commonly celebrated for their cholesterol-lowering qualities and high levels of omega fatty acids.

Regarding culinary applications, each of these different fats brings a unique effect to the ingredient list. For low-fat food products, it is best to minimize unhealthy fats like saturated and trans fats, focusing instead on the equally tasty and healthful Mono- and polyunsaturated fats.

What is “Considered a Low-Fat Food Product”?

While there is no universal definition for low-fat food, the general guideline suggests that a diet qualifies as low-fat when 30% or fewer calories come from fat. More specifically, for every 100 calories consumed from food, less than 3 grams should come from fat. Luckily, many produce options already qualify as low-fat: Vegetables, fruit, beans, even skinless meat, and egg whites are considered low-fat food options. Regarding commercial food products or food consumed more for its flavor than its nutrition, low-fat food can be a unique debacle requiring a unique solution.

Different Kinds of Fat Replacers

A replacement must be found to lower the quantity of various fats in food, which bring unique combinations of flavor, texture, structure, and moisture to the ingredient list. Food chemists have found a collection of alternatives to replace fat in recipes, allowing recipe testers to find a way to make their products low-fat.

Carbohydrate-based

Carbohydrate-based fat replacers are typically derived from corn, cereal, wheat, and other starchy grains. Carbohydrate-based fat replacers, such as cellulose, gelatins, gums, and dietary fibers, are often on grocery store shelves.

Protein-based

Protein-based fat replacers are derived by modifying food proteins, primarily used to lower caloric content in a fatty product. Proteins such as egg white or milk whey create easily digestible, low-calorie fat replacements high in amino acids.

Fat-based

Fat-based fat replacers seem counterintuitive but serve to lower the caloric content of a fatty product by introducing a lower-calorie fat. Fat-based replacers are derived by replacing triglycerides in vegetable oils, which alters their molecular complexity and caloric content in various ways.

Each of these different fat replacers brings benefits and obstacles to developing a low-fat product, but they effectively reduce the fat content in prepared foods.

The Perfect Flavors for Any Recipe

Your low-fat health product doesn’t have to come at the expense of taste. Using high-quality flavor chemistry and decades of experience in ingredient development, Metarom USA has all the functional flavors and fat replacers you will need to develop the perfect health product. Metarom’s flavor experts will work directly alongside recipe developers to find precisely what ingredients will work and the form factor they need to shine. Contact Metarom USA to find the secret ingredient to any profile, from flavored oils to vanilla pastes and even flavored fat replacers.

Nothing fits the holidays quite like toasty walnuts, candied pecans, or roasted almonds — From cookies to pies and even coffee flavorings, nuts are a popular and delicious flavor for various culinary applications. Using decades of experience and industry-leading food science, Metarom USA offers numerous excellent flavors to add richness, depth, and aromatic nuance to your dishes and recipes, helping culinary artists find the perfect flavor profile for their final product.

Whether mixed into a caramel sauce for coffee or filling an almond croissant, Metarom has the right flavoring agent. Choose from water-based, oil-based, and even powdered flavors to find the perfect format for your recipe! Metarom USA is dedicated to working with customers to develop the ideal flavor ingredient, even adding nutritional additives and flavor masks to perfect the blend for unique culinary products. Develop the best recipe for your workflow and production process, and ensure you have an authentic, true-to-life flavor.

Nut Flavors for Baking

Baked goods are an essential treat for the holiday season; from almond cookies to pistachio sweet bread, nuts provide a roasted, creamy, slightly sweet flavor to baked goods that other ingredients can’t replicate. Whether mixing it into a caramel filling or adding a flavor powder to your dough, Metarom USA has authentic, true-to-life nut extracts that will provide the perfect depth and complexity to your baked goods. Whether you’re developing pre-packaged goods for distributed sale or homemade treats for friends and family, you can find an affordable and consistent flavor ingredient for your recipe — an essential quality for any baker.

Nut Flavors for Coffee

Flavored coffee is ubiquitous, with many coffee drinkers bringing the specialty experience home for the holidays. As espresso machines and pour-overs are unwrapped, many search for the perfect ingredients for their next latte. Metarom USA offers a variety of nutty additives that can be mixed into caramels, mocha sauces, or syrup to provide the perfect mix of flavors for a morning brew. Nuts are an ideal complement to the cherry, chocolate, and spiced notes of coffee, and Metarom’s true-to-source, nuanced flavors will be sure to perform.

Nut Flavors for Dessert

Not all desserts are baked around the holidays, but nuts can be used just the same! The slightly sweet, savory, woody nuts aroma will benefit Italian chocolate salami, chocolate bark, and elegant enrobed confections. Metarom USA offers pistachio, almond, and other nut flavors to help confectioners and chocolatiers find the ideal dessert profile. Add flavor agents to enrobed truffles, delicate gateaux, or chilled cheesecakes to create a genuinely exceptional holiday dish.

Nut Flavors for Function

Cuisine is about more than taste — Metarom USA’s flavors are also available as functional additives, adding nutrition and balance to any flavor mix. Add bitter blockers, masking agents, fat replacements, and other additives to add a nutty and nutritious boost to health drinks, protein bars, and supplements. Metarom USA uses our dedicated team of flavor engineers and tasters to provide you with the perfect balance of flavor and nutrition without compromising the complexity and taste of the original product.

Flavor Formats for Any Recipe

Metarom USA offers our pistachio, almond, pecan, and other nut flavors in a variety of form factors to suit any ingredient list:

Water-Based

Water-based flavors dissolve effortlessly into liquid solutions, perfect for pound cakes, pie fillings, and custards. These differ from alcohol extracts and can accommodate particular diets or recipes where acids can split the mixture.

Oil-Based

Oil-based flavors mix well into fat or fat-heavy mixtures, ideal for butter, caramels, and brownies. Use oil-based agents to make the perfect compound kinds of butter or bring another layer of depth and nuance to fat-based desserts like white chocolate ganache, cheesecakes, and more.

Powder-Based

Powder-based nut flavors disperse into dry mixes perfectly, ideal for doughs, pie crusts, or cooking. The dry nature of powder also enables a longer shelf life, perfect for production processes.

Extract

Extracts are a classic flavoring agent, using alcohol to extract flavor from the source. Add them to baked goods, beverages, or anything that uses a traditional flavor extract.

Spray-Dried

Spray-dried flavors are an emulsified, then-dried flavoring agent, making for a phenomenal shelf-life and authenticity of flavor. Like powder-based offerings, spray-dried flavors are perfect for large or long production processes.

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Perfect your recipe and get access to Metarom USA’s wide selection of authentic, true-to-life flavors today! Metarom’s team of food engineers and decades of experience have supplied culinary inventors with nuanced, rich, and varied flavors with precision and quality at the forefront of the design process. Find the perfect flavor to add to your mixture from Metarom’s online store today!

Founded in France in the 1950s, Metarom USA carries a wide assortment of the most unique fruit flavors available to the world of gastronomy, perfect for a wide variety of dietary, culinary, and mixology products. No matter if you need a true-to-life flavoring for mixed drinks or a stabilizing additive for pastries, Metarom USA has decades of experience and quality dedicated to providing you with authentic and delicious fruit flavorings that are certain to impress with their nuance, depth, and boldness of flavor. Available as water-based, oil-based, and powdered flavors, Metarom can help you find the perfect authentic flavoring for your next culinary project, whether it’s a fan favorite fruit or a niche liquor.

For Baking

From classic fruits like Strawberry and Cherry to more unique fruit flavors like Guava or Cointreau, Metarom USA has a selection of excellent offerings to create the perfect profile in your baked goods. These oil-based and powdered flavorings are perfect for mixing into fats or doughs, providing a valuable alternative to water- and alcohol-based flavoring extracts. From berry compotes to rich fruit caramels, Metarom USA’s wide selection of flavors will help you develop a nuanced, balanced, and well-flavored pastry that won’t split ingredients or alter the baking process.

Bakers and pastry chefs may also be interested in Metarom’s selection of fat replacers, built to help replace gelatins, kinds of butter, egg whites, and many other natural fats commonly found in pastry recipes. Whatever your recipe, Metarom USA will work with you to find the perfect ingredient for your product.

For Drinks

From Cafe Lattes to Campari Spritzes, sometimes a beverage needs a little boost! Metarom USA is happy to provide exquisite fruit flavorings and caramels for a variety of mixology applications, from flavored caramels for coffee to fruit extracts for cocktails; Metarom’s authentic, true-to-life flavors provide beverages with a florality and herbal quality that is commonly missing in other fruit flavorings, granting a nuanced and complex profile to any drink it is added to.

Mixologists will also benefit from Metarom USA’s many functional flavorings, providing bitter blockers, sweetness enhancers, and other masking agents to bring the perfect balance and flavor to your beverage. Mask caffeine flavors and brighten beverages’ fruity sweetness with Metarom’s many flavor offerings.

For Nutrition

Food is more than just flavor — It also has to be nutritious! Metarom USA offers fruit flavors to provide unique profiles and nutrient blends for various nutritional applications, such as protein shakes, ready-to-drink meals, performance drinks, and protein bars. Combined with their functional flavorings, producers can create a perfectly balanced product that does not taste chemicals, additives, or artificial flavoring, ideal for sports and energy drinks. Metarom USA can also work with product-makers to add nutritional and flavorful caramels to make healthy and delicious recipes for food and beverages. No matter what the application, Metarom USA will use its decades of experience and technical experts to find the perfect ingredient for your mix.

For Confections

Chocolatiers and candy-makers can access the most unique and bold fruit flavors through Metarom USA, granting your bespoke confections a flavor and nuance unattainable by other standards. From unique liquor flavors for chocolate truffles to colored fruit additives for hard candies, the flavor extracts from Metarom will provide flavors in a format that will easily mix into your production workflow.

Confectioners will also benefit from Metarom’s confectionery caramel, which can be mixed with many other flavorings as a sauce, powder, or liquid extract, sure to bring an extra level of complexity to any sweet confection. Metarom has been producing caramels since the beginning of their business, and can use their decades of expertise to develop the perfect ingredient for any dessert.

How Metarom Develops Flavors

Metarom originally began business as a caramel manufacturer in 1953, growing into vanilla and fruit flavoring as the business grew. With many decades of experience and a scientific approach to the flavor manufacturing process, Metarom can provide customers with SQF and Kosher certified, organic products that are packed with bold flavor and consistent across production batches. Never be concerned with alterations to your workflow or process — Metarom USA works alongside customers to create the ideal flavor and nutritional mix to meet any need. Whether you are a large manufacturer or a small business, Metarom has the ingredients and knowledge to rise to any challenge.

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From performance energy drinks to baked goods and packaged confections, Metarom USA has the knowledge and tools to help you create the perfect flavor profile. Using our wide selection of true-to-life flavorings, we can provide a variety of ingredient formats, including water-based, oil-based, and powdered form factors. We can also offer nutritional supplements with our flavoring mixes, creating the ideal flavor compound for your product. Contact a representative at Metarom or order from our online store — You’ll surely find what you need.

Fall is here – it’s time to break out cozy sweaters, pie pans, and hiking boots. With the change in the weather comes an opportunity for fall-inspired dishes and drinks. Companies and individuals do well to capitalize on the potent possibilities of seasonal experiences to delight the eye and the tongue. Let Metarom USA bring you the Fall experience you’ve always wanted.

Whether you’re looking for a specific brown note to add to a yummy dessert or you need broader autumn flavors for a wide range of recipes, get inspiration (not to mention FREE samples!) from the quality source of Metarom USA. Keep reading to discover some of our ready-made 2023 Fall flavors, or you can contact us to craft a custom flavor profile appropriate for this season.

Warm Brown Notes

Here at Metarom USA, we know that Fall brings to mind an array of colors, but you can’t go wrong with a warm, earthy brown. Whether the bright-colored leaves have started falling or not, the rich symphony of sweet brown flavors can dance on your tongue, screaming, “autumn!” Imagine a combination of just a few of our brown Fall flavors:

• The velvety seduction of vanilla
• The sumptuous embrace of chocolate
• The nutty deliciousness of pecan or walnut
• The unique touch of brown spices

These brown notes are perfect for crafting Autumn flavors.

Savory Fall Flavors

Fall isn’t just about the sweet! We love these savory, even spicy, Fall flavors. For an aromatic allure of herbal blends, elegance of delicate floral notes, and the heartiness of meat-inspired delights, get inspired with the appropriately seasonal selections from Metarom USA in the following categories:

• Herbal
• Culinary
• Floral
• International
• Meat

For more information about any of these Autumn flavors, please reach out directly to our team. You can get free samples as well as personalized advice based on your preferences and needs.

Get Ready for Fall Baking

From apple pie to pumpkin bread and everything in between, for many people, fall is the season synonymous with baking. For baking this season, you’ll want baking ingredients or inclusions that typify Autumn flavors, from a caramel drizzle to a hearty fruit glaze.

We offer high-quality bake-stable fillings in caramel and other flavors. Our components will help your recipes taste and work the way they are intended. Our bakery intermediates include:

• Bake-stable fillings
• Bake-stable layers
• Bread improver
• Bread softener
• Buttercream
• Cake fillings
• Cake toppings
• Donut fillings
• Dough conditioner
• Drizzles
• Fondant
• Frostings
• Fruit jams
• Glazes
• Icings
• Inclusions
• Jellies

With such a comprehensive selection, we have the Fall flavors to exceed your baking expectations this season.

Traditional Alternatives

We understand that traditional flavors are popular for a reason, but also that there are many people for whom the traditions need updating or adapting. If you have special dietary restrictions or are looking for more healthy alternatives to the traditional Fall flavors this season, don’t worry! Metarom USA makes it easy to eat your specific diet with all our options. Take a look at the difference between our traditional and alternative dairy options:

As you can see, we’re accommodating with the options for our Autumn flavors. Dietary restrictions, health considerations, or other factors that influence what ingredients you want to be included in your recipes can easily be accommodated with our wide-ranging selections. So many options are available that it is more possible than ever to get the exact combinations to meet your needs and your wants.

If any of the above sounds interesting to you, or you want specific advice from the experts about what alternatives make sense for you, get in touch with our team.

Warm Fall Drinks

When many of us think of Fall flavors, we can’t help but conjure up images of fall drinks. From pumpkin-flavored coffee creamers to a tall glass of apple cider, many beverage selections are uniquely considered to be the property of this fall season. We offer a variety of options for beverages here at Metarom USA, from everyday beverages to alcoholic options to sports drinks to healthy options. Here is a sampling of the possibilities we offer that are perfect for the autumn season:

• Coffee & matcha
• Seasonal flavored syrups & concentrates
• Apple cider
• Warm dairy-based beverages
• Teas
• Fruit juices

If you’re looking for a drink that incorporates Fall flavors, let us know and we can help you craft the perfect flavor profile.

Crafting Your Flavor Profile for Fall

Hopefully, you’ve started to get inspired by our catalog of options above. However, whether you know precisely what Fall flavors you want or are unsure, our talented team can work with you to make your flavor profile. Incorporating warm brown notes, savory options or sweet sensations, traditional ingredients, or alternatives into foods or drinks may seem overwhelming. Still, it’s just a day on the job for our flavor experts. With decades of experience, fall baking combinations and more will come easily to our top-trained team. We can help you customize our ingredients into a stable mixture that can meet all your requirements. There are limitless possibilities for potent Autumn flavors that will work well together.

Secure Your Free Samples of Autumn Flavors Today

Metarom USA is your quality source of Fall flavors. You can request your free samples today here. One of our flavor experts will be in touch with you soon. We’ll create the seasonal flavor profile you crave on the scale appropriate for your project. Let’s form our flavor partnership this fall!

“Vanilla” is mistakenly equated with being “dull” – but vanilla is a refined and diverse ingredient with various uses and possibilities. Natural vanilla is exceptionally scarce and very expensive, and there is a wide range of natural and synthetic vanilla sources and uses. Let’s explore all the flavors of vanilla. We are proud to source the highest quality of different vanilla flavors here at Metarom USA. Request a free sample, or let us know if you want advice in crafting a custom flavor profile using vanilla.

Why Natural Vanilla Is So Scarce and So Expensive

So, what’s the big deal with vanilla? It seems readily available since every restaurant and grocery store has vanilla ice cream as the baseline flavor. But at least 97% of the “vanilla” used in the world is synthetic, and so real, natural vanilla is the second most expensive spice in the world (after saffron). Here are some of the requirements for the delicate vanilla orchid plant to thrive:

• A moist, tropical climate with year-round temperatures around 75-85 degrees Fahrenheit
• There is relatively little wind and reasonably high humidity in the growing area
• Soil rich in organic matter on terrain that is gently sloping to allow adequate, but not excessive, drainage
• A mixture of sun and shade
• At elevation from sea level to about 2,5000 feet
• Pollination only by the Mexican Melipona bee or a very time-consuming method for pollination by hand

As you can see from this list, it’s hard to find places where vanilla can thrive naturally. This problem makes authentic vanilla rare and thus expensive as an ingredient, though price varies widely for different vanilla flavors. Getting the flavors of vanilla is typically a lengthy and involved process: let’s see where the sources are.

Where Vanilla Comes From

Authentic flavors of vanilla are sourced from a variety of countries. Now that there is the possibility for hand pollination, vanilla can be grown outside of Mexico, where the pollinating bee for authentic vanilla originates. Countries currently involved in providing natural sources of vanilla include:

• Mexico
• Madagascar
• Tahiti
• Indonesia
• Other islands, such as the Seychelles and Jamaica
• India
• China

As you can see, this is quite a wide-ranging list. With the variety in location comes, of course, different vanilla flavors. Each of these sources of natural vanilla provides slightly different flavors and potencies. For instance, the Vanilla tahitiensis, a Tahitian form of vanilla grown on the island of Niue, has a lower content of actual vanilla but does have a sweeter floral scent and a more delicate or fruitier taste. No matter where natural vanilla is sourced, it will be expensive, but specific harvesting methods will be more prized and rare than other options.

The Range of Synthetic Vanilla Options

Because natural vanilla is so rare, hard to get, and expensive, most options for flavors of vanilla are synthetic. “Vanillin” is the synthetic version of the flavor compound synthesized in a lab. Synthetic versions of vanilla extract, beans, specks, flecks, and more are fabricated en masse to provide the “regular” flavor we all know as vanilla. Artificial vanillin lacks the real depth of the flavor profile in natural vanilla, which has hundreds of flavor compounds in one.

However, just because a flavor is fabricated doesn’t mean it isn’t potent or effective. Synthetic flavors of vanilla are more straightforward and less expensive, which means you get the primary taste of vanilla without going through the cost and extensive preparation process of using the original. Also, because many authentic flavors get lost at high temperatures, synthetic vanilla is preferred for some baked goods.

Different Vanilla Flavors Available at Metarom USA

Here at Metarom USA, we carry a wide range of vanilla products that we manufacture ourselves. Even within our specific categories, specialization and personalization are available; for example, we offer our commercial vanilla extract in several strengths. Please reach out with special requests for your flavors of vanilla, and we can work with you on your unique flavor profile. For a general overview, here are the categories of different vanilla flavors we offer here:

• Vanilla Beans

Even when sourcing in bulk, our beans are guaranteed the finest quality, handpicked for pure vanilla flavor straight from the source. Our vanilla beans are often ground to create a thick mass used for chocolate manufacturing. You can request a sample for your flavor profile if you are interested in this possibility.

• Vanilla Specks

For the presence of vanilla to be evident to both the eye and the tongue, there’s nothing better than our authentic vanilla specks. Specks are often used to bring vanilla flavors to dairy applications, like protein shakes. In our process, we exhaust vanilla beans, then dry, sterilize, and grind them into a powder, forming these specks. These specks mimic the appearance of our next category at a fraction of their cost:

• Vanilla Seeds

Bringing authentic flavor and appearance, our careful process secures uniform size for our beans with exhaustion, sieving, and more. Quality is guaranteed with our different vanilla flavors.

• Vanilla Bean Paste

For bulk needs such as vanilla for whipped cream, frosting, ice creams, and more, we offer quality vanilla bean paste with a more intense version of the flavor than you can get in extracts:

• Vanilla Extract

A popular choice, our commercial vanilla extract is meticulously created to be quality in various strengths. We can be your supplier and consultant on using vanilla in your flavor profile.

Enjoy the Many Flavors of Vanilla

If you’re looking to include any flavors of vanilla in your custom flavor profile, let us know, and we can help you find the right choice from our different vanilla flavors that will fit your needs. We can provide a free sample of a given option for vanilla, as well as our expert advice in crafting recipes with quality ingredients.