As food bottlenecks encourage political unrest and drive conflicts, a lasting supply of safe, tasty and high-quality food for the population in consideration of economic, ecological, social and cultural aspects is of key importance. The expected continuous population growth, climatic changes as well as changes in dietary patterns, driven by billions of people joining the middle class in the coming years, faces our agricultural-food sector a great balancing act in the near future. At the same time, the consumer behavior is changing, particularly in the industrialized countries. Food is increasingly central to how people identify themselves; they are looking for healthy, sustainably produced, personalized and performance-increasing nutritional concepts.<br/>The development of healthier food products, for example, reduced in fat, sugar, or salt, respectively, are well-known to induce nonacceptable flavor defects in the products and has, thus, created unexpected flavor challenges for the food industry. In response to the consumers’ demand for healthy but tasty foods, novel ingredient discovery is essential to overcome such flavor challenges associated with the production of, in particular, sugar, salt or fat-reduced products. The presentation will highlight analytical strategies to identify key taste compounds and taste modulators in food by means of a Sensomics approach. The knowledge of such chemosensory key molecules then opens new avenues towards a better understanding of their sensory activity by correlating functional data from human psychophysics studies and taste receptor activation patterns. Moreover, the population of chemosensory active molecules (“sensometabolome”) is used as a molecular blueprint for visualizing the changes in sensometabolite profiles throughout breeding programs, post-harvest manufacturing processes, and/or storage of food.

Translational taste research: Discovery of molecular targets for flavor innovations

ACS Fall 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.