Symrise beefs up its authentic meat flavour range

31-Mar-2011 - Last updated on 05-Apr-2011 at 15:13 GMT

Symrise has developed a new range of beef flavours intended to help food manufacturers bring authentic gourmet tastes into consumers’ homes, through a collaboration between chefs, flavourists, researchers and marketers.

Mike Ostrowski, competence manager for meat in EMEA told FoodNavigator.com that the new line took a year and a half to develop. The development process involved going out into the marketplace to study existing beef products and map consumer preferences.

The chefs then worked to identify the best raw material – a cut of meat from a particular origin – and prepared it restaurant-style. These dishes were used as targets by the flavourists, whose job was to “transfer the culinary flavour to the industrial level”.

“It is vital to have a tool to understand what taste compounds are in these culinary targets,” Ostrowski said. They were able to use the company’s proprietary SymStixx for analysing the flavour composition.

The collaborative approach is important as it results in foods “with a special authentic culinary note, and it also guarantees optimal industrial processing and flavour stability,” the company says.

The collection falls into three ‘clusters’: Culinary Authentic, South America, and Remarkable.

While there is some overlap between the three, Ostrowski said the Culinary Authentic cluster broadly refers to specific tastes in meat preparation, such as the juiciness of a restaurant-cooked fillet, whether a steak is rare, medium or well done.

The South American cluster refers to typical barbecue and charcoal notes. Interestingly, when the flavourists analysed the notes in Brazilian and Argentine targets they found some of the same notes also appear in markets such as Eastern Europe.

The Remarkable range, meanwhile, is strong on process notes such as fried, braised and cooked.

Tailor-made options

Symrise has already presented the beef collection to some customers. “Very often the customer wants tailor-made,” Ostrowski said, explaining that the collection is often used as a starting point for building solutions that meet precise requirements.

“We have to raise questions to find out what the objective is for the customer.” Customers often ask for market insights from Symrise as well, so it is not as straightforward as just supplying a flavour.

One of the most pressing needs the company has identified is big retailers who require clean label flavours, without taste enhancers, yeast extracts or allergens.

Flavours in Symrise’s new beef collection flavours are considered as ‘natural’ or ‘flavourings’ (formerly ‘nature identical’) under the new European flavour legislation. They are not 95-5 natural, and Ostrowski said this is extremely difficult to achieve with meat flavours.

Symrise is not stopping at beef, however. Market needs analysis work has already started on a new collection of chicken flavours, which is planned for launch in 2012.