Taste and aroma are two primary drivers of flavor perception. Despite the spatial isolation of these receptors, perceptual interactions between the two flavor modalities has been demonstrated. This research project further investigates mechanisms of taste-aroma interactions and their impact on flavor perception. Specifically, it is focused on characterizing how bitter tastants influence the retronasal perception of coffee aroma. In a coffee aroma model system, different bitter compounds added at isobitter intensities were reported to elicit different coffee retronasal profiles. To determine if orthonasal perception was playing a role in the changes, a tetrad test was conducted to evaluate the effect of each compound on the orthonansal perception of coffee aroma. No significant orthonasal differences were found. Furthermore, dynamic headspace analysis reported similar volatile profiles between recombinants. To assess if the bitter compounds differ in their bitter sub-quality perception, a sorted napping experiment was employed. This methodology evaluated whether the bitter tastants could be grouped based on sensorial similarities, as well as how closely the sensations evoked by each group of compounds were to one another. Eleven panelists evaluated thirteen bitter compounds. To ensure that the focus was on bitter sub-qualities and not differences in bitter intensity, panelists participated in a titration procedure to create an individualized “weak/moderate” sample set for testing. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) was used to determine bitterant groupings and multiple factor analysis (MFA) was used further understand the distance between these groups and to account for individual differences in subject perception. MDS data revealed 3 distinct bitterant groups based on bitter sub-quality (tucker's coefficient of congruence 0.98417). Defining cross-modal interactions between aroma and taste compounds provide insights for informed and reliable product reformulation approaches, streamlining product design and eliminating the need for extensive consumer testing.

Impact of bitter tastants on volatile flavor perception of coffee

256th National Meeting (2018)

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