A Sensory Panelist using the Simultaneous Gustometer Olfactometer

Understanding food flavour using the Simultaneous Gustometer Olfactometer

CSIRO has developed the Simultaneous Gustometer Olfactometer (SGO) to help food manufacturers develop healthier tasty foods and help researchers understand how taste and aroma combine to produce flavour.

• 29 July 2010 | Updated 14 October 2011

Understanding flavour and developing healthier foods

The SGO will help researchers study taste and aroma and how they combine to create flavour.

The device can also help improve the reformulation of foods for health, for example, developing a low-fat version of a product that tastes similar to the full-fat version.

Food for health

The success of healthier food options is dependent on whether consumers will enjoy the flavour of healthier foods.

While most agree that there needs to be less salt, sugar and fat in food, these components provide necessary sensory characteristics.

The SGO will help food manufactures to quickly formulate foods with less salt, sugar and fat, but still taste good, by allowing them to find flavour profiles for lower fat, salt and sugar foods that taste similar to their less-healthy counterparts.

Once food scientists know what flavour profile works to achieve a particular flavour quality they can apply their sophisticated understanding of the chemistry, physics and structure of food to develop healthier alternatives.

Without the SGO this process might require many months or even years of repeated reformulation followed by sensory testing. Developing a better understanding of flavour will also help develop healthier alternatives.

Understanding flavour - a complex science

How food tastes and whether we enjoy it is a result of the complicated interaction of chemistry, physics, biology and psychology. Sensory scientists have gained a sophisticated insight into the basis of flavour but there is still much to learn.

As we eat we use a combination of aroma and the basic tastes - bitter, sour, savoury, salt, sweet and fat - to make a judgement about the food and whether we should eat more.

The perceived flavour is dependent on both the aroma and taste and how these change as we eat. The flavour profile of a particular food is a combination of these tastes and odours and how they change over time. Similar foods can have different flavour profiles, for example a low-fat yoghurt has a short sharp delivery of the aroma components of the flavour while the full-fat delivery is long-lasting.

Beyond the physical and chemical aspects of flavour there are further social, psychological and neurological factors.

The SGO will provide sensory and other scientists the opportunity to experiment with different flavour profiles and their impact on flavour perception. Such experiments could test proposed theories as to how our sensory system works to asses flavour and choose to consume more or less of a food.