Many food products produced in factories contain the ingredient “flavor identical to natural”. Natural components that give food a pleasant taste and rich aroma are too expensive, so in the laboratory they create artificial analogs using certain chemical compounds.
Natural identical flavors
There are three types of food flavors: natural, artificial and identical to natural. The first is made from natural aromatic substances: for example, real rose petals, mint leaves, jasmine. Natural flavors can be of both plant and animal origin. There is no such ingredient in artificial additives: they are completely artificial, in laboratories, and there are no analogues of such substances in nature.
Although in their composition and aroma properties, they may be a bit similar to natural flavors.
Natural identical flavors occupy an intermediate place between the types described above. Most of their composition, and sometimes the entire substance, is also synthesized in laboratories, but their chemical composition is as close as possible to natural analogs. This means that approximately 80-90% of the elements of certain natural raw materials are present in these flavors. Scientists cannot yet identify 100%: they release only the main substances that make up the basis of the smell, but subtle notes of other impurities also affect the smell.
Therefore, an unnatural flavor always has a too rich, flat, even "chemical" aroma.
Natural raw materials can also be used in the production of these substances. However, the term "natural identical flavors" is not used in many countries: all non-natural substances are classified there as artificial.
Production of flavors identical to natural
As a rule, one flavoring agent, identical to the natural one, consists of 7-15 chemical elements and compounds, which are also part of its natural counterpart, which, nevertheless, contains about a hundred elements in total. Chemical compounds for the production of food flavorings are created in the laboratory using a variety of raw materials, including those not related to food.
Some compounds have a rich odor characteristic of a certain natural product. They are used as the main ingredient in the production of fragrances. So, instead of cinnamon, cinnamon aldehyde is added to food - a complex organic substance synthesized from the essential oil of cinnamon. Isoamyl acetate or ethyl decadienoate is responsible for the pear smell. Allylgescanoate has a persistent pineapple odor. By mixing these compounds with each other, manufacturers get new smells. Today, almost every natural flavoring has its counterpart, which is identical to the natural one.
