Flavour and its impact on our lives. Why does taste matter?

Flavour and its impact on our daily lives, psychology, and decision-making are often overlooked factors. In everyday life, we spend more time thinking about satisfying our physiological needs for food and drink and less time understanding how the flavour works and its effect on our emotional state. Understanding why we like what we like will help us better manage our food choices or drinks.

In the Food & Beverage industry, particularly in restaurants and bars, if chefs and bartenders focus only on the actual taste of the dish or drink, they are not fully exploring the potential of a whole flavour experience by the intended clientele.

Granted, the taste of a drink or dish is essential, but it is only half the story of achieving and offering a complete flavour experience. 

The flavour is a multisensory sensation, and its perception process starts long before we even try anything. It begins with subconscious feedback from our peripheral senses; it creates motivation, “I want to have it,” making sense of it on a conscious level, and taking action (ordering the product). 

Taste and smell are the last parts of forming a flavour opinion. If any previous elements are not up to our guests’ expectations, the customer’s dining experience may not be as we wanted it to be.

Some examples of factors and questions influencing flavour perception can be:

• Visual feedback of the surroundings we are in. Do we like the palace we are in?
  • Presentation: Do we like the way our drink or food looks like? How many times do we get an order based on the “I want the same as the other table is having” 
    
• Do we hear anything that may not meet our expectations of a pleasurable ambiance?
• Do we smell any weird odours?
• The cleanliness of the establishment and the staff working there.
• Professionalism –  the expected level of professionalism and privacy from the serving personnel based on the establishment’s projected image.

If some of the above criteria don’t meet our guests’ expectations, it doesn’t matter how good the drink tastes; the customers will not fully appreciate the intended flavour, and the resulting feedback will not be what we were hoping for.

To allow the intended perceived flavour to be enjoyed entirely, we should shift our focus from the physical properties of the smell and taste and include its emotional part, as they are integral to forming a positive flavour image in our brain. 

That’s where the ultimate decision on whether we like something occurs; not factoring in all the variables that lead to that decision will most likely result in unsatisfied guests.

To understand how a flavour works, let’s define what it is and how we decide what tastes or may not.

The beauty of a flavor is that it can trigger olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste) and trigeminal (nervous) sensations…it enables us to enjoy unique and pleasurable flavors and trigger emotions, and multi-sensory experiences” ¹

— according to Catherine Vermeulen, Flavor Expert at Puratos

Flavor Elements

The flavour consists of:

• Smell
  • Orthonasal olfaction
  • Retronasal olfaction 
• Taste 
• Touch (Mouthfeel)
• Vision
• Hearing
• Emotional factors
  • Memories
  • Cultural background
  • Expectations
  • Emotional state

Let’s define these senses and their role in forming a flavour opinion.

By themselves, food ingredients don’t have flavour. There are raw materials with their molecular composition from which the brain creates flavour.²

For the brain to create a flavour image, it needs information input that utilizes the smell, taste, and touch sensors to relay the detected molecules or sensations in the food or drinks to the brain’s sensory processing center.

Smell Sense – Orthonasal olfaction

The sense of smell, known as olfaction, is part of the olfactory system. It is a dual system of detecting odour molecules. The first pathway is through the nose (orthonasal perceptions), and the other is through the mouth (retronasal perceptions).

The aroma is responsible for nearly 80 percent of the initial flavour perception.

Aroma’s pathway to the sensory processing center begins with detecting the molecules in the air and sending a signal through the olfactory nerves straight to the brain sensory center (the olfactory bulb), where the contextual smell image is created. From there, the odour messages go to several brain structures that make up the “olfactory cortex.

The olfactory cortex (the “older primitive” subconscious area of the brain’s emotional and memory center and place where the content addressable memory is formed)³ send the smell input directly to the highest level of the human brain – the orbitofrontal cortex (the newer center for human’s cognitive functions). By bypassing the thalamus (the relay sense center, to which other senses, taste, vision, and hearing are connected) and connecting directly to the highest level of decision-making, it shows that the brain treats smell as a critical part of evaluating and preserving our body from potentially harmful substances.

The olfactory bulb (sensory center) connects to the olfactory cortex, the emotion center (amygdala), and the memory relay center (hippocampus). These last two areas are essential for emotion and memory formation, explaining why smell can trigger powerful emotions and memories before a person can identify the odour.

It is truly remarkable when a specific smell suddenly invokes long-forgotten memories. It feels like the world has stopped; for a brief moment, it is just you and a vivid memory image. All this processing happens subconsciously in the olfactory cortex, which evolved before the cortical regions that give us consciousness.

Olfactory Fatigue – Nose blindness

The olfactory sensors are highly adaptable to new aromas, which means after each subsequent sniff of an odour, the effect of this smell diminishes.

Eventually, that may lead to a temporary inability to distinguish a particular odour after prolonged exposure. For example, when entering a restaurant, we often perceive food’s odour as very strong. Still, after time, the awareness of the odour typically fades to the point where the smell is not perceptible or much weaker.⁴

One way to “reboot” our ability to smell is to use coffee beans as “nasal palate cleansers,” as per fragrance sellers. 

College students repeatedly smelled three fragrances, rating odours to test this idea. After completing nine trials, participants sniffed coffee beans, lemon slices, or plain air. Participants then indicated which of the presented fragrances had not been previously smelled; coffee beans did not yield better performance than lemon slices or air. ⁵

Nevertheless, it is one more reason to buy coffee. 

This condition is not to be confused with Anosmia, the permanent loss of the sense of smell and is different from olfactory fatigue.

Smell training

Research conducted at the University of Dresden’s Smell and Taste Clinic in Germany found that people can enhance their olfactory bulbs with training. The researchers added that people with an average sense of smell could increase the size of their olfactory bulbs by trying out four aromas twice a day for about 30 seconds each.

One can try by s