Published: 11 October, 2000

Taste takes more than just tongues

How do they put the flavor in candy?

Brandi, this is a great question because foods are so interesting and a great way to understand chemistry. Everyone enjoys the "taste" of food and especially candy. The answer involves both the chemistry of taste and how humans taste foods.

First, we've got to understand something about taste and smell so we can understand why foods, including candy, taste like they do and how we get the flavor in to these products. What we call "taste" is really a combination of what happens in our mouths (especially on the tongue) and what happens inside our noses.

Sensors inside our mouths taste only 4 basic flavors: salty (like salty potato chips), sour (like sour candy), sweet (like sugar), and bitter (like some medicines). These are important tastes but if they were all we could taste, food, including candy would be pretty boring.

The other part of "taste" occurs in our noses. Chemicals escape from our food into the air when we chew or when we drink beverages. These chemicals then enter our nose through passages in the back of the mouth. Tiny cells in the nose capture these chemicals, analyze them and send a message to our brains. Our brain then interprets these messages and assigns a "smell." For example, if we eat an orange, chemicals unique to oranges enter our nose from the back of our mouth, causing a message to be sent to our brains, which says "Hey this tastes like an orange".

So it's the chemicals in a food that give it its flavor. But how do these chemicals get into our foods? In most cases, the chemicals are just naturally a part of the food. Oranges are a great example. Oranges contain a group of chemicals that cause the characteristic orange flavor in the nose. In fact, different varieties of oranges have slightly different mixes of chemicals so each has a unique taste. These differences occur primarily in the nose because our mouth only tastes sweet and sour from an orange.

So on to your question. How do we make orange candy taste like an orange (or grape or cherry or whatever)? Well, we have a couple of choices. First we might collect the chemicals that give oranges their flavor from oranges (or orange peels), concentrate them, and add them (along with some orange color) to sweet candy. Or we might also determine exactly what chemicals make up orange flavor and then duplicate the chemicals. We could then add these synthetic "orange flavor" chemicals to the candy with similar results. We can go through this process with hundreds of different flavors.

By the way, this is true not only for candy but also for all of our foods. We add spices to foods, cinnamon for example, because these spices contain chemicals that "taste" good. We add cinnamon spice or chemicals to rolls and candies, for example. Some flavor chemicals are not present in a food but develop during cooking. Sometimes we don't like the taste of chemicals in certain foods. Usually we avoid these chemicals (unless mom or dad makes us eat a food because it's good for us).

So next time your enjoying your favorite food, think about the flavor in your mouth and the flavor in your nose. Our brains sum up our response to these flavors to give what we call taste.