Five minutes at FI Europe  with … 

Pierre Miclette
President General Manager

Agro-Food Industry Hi-Tech: How do you add value to healthy nutrition?
Pierre Miclette: We are a Canadian company but we have operations in USA, Germany and now we are opening a  culinary kitchen in Seregno, Italy. We create flavour solutions for all segments of the food industry but we have a focus in nutraceutical products: dietary nutrition, functional foods and sport nutrition. Most of the time, when such a product is made, the nutraceutical company focuses on the active ingredient(s). These ingredients, even if very healthy, can have tastes that need a lot of improvement, a lot of love! What Foodarom is taking care of the flavouring part, to give a signature to the product.

AF: Given the focus on health nutrition, do you work mostly with natural sources and compounds?
PM: We work both with natural and synthesis compounds. We have an organic line, but what people tend to forget is: we are made of chemistry. When we cook we are making chemistry, when we bite an apple, there are tons of chemicals that made its flavour. We should not fear chemistry.

AF: Yet the public sometimes is not fully aware of that…
PM: This is true, but then it is our job to explain this, to let the public discover that chemistry is not necessarily bad, but it is instead a normal part of life.

AF: What are the challenges you meet in flavour design?
PM: We give flavour classes to help people talk about flavour. We go to school and we learn colours, and so we have the right conceptual tools to talk about colours. But we rarely do, if ever, the same with flavour, which is a much more complex experience, and this means it is difficult often to even talk about flavours. In a lot of cases I work in projects in which I try to discuss the taste customers want, but we do not even share the same vocabulary. That complicates a lot our flavour design work. In a lot of cases we have to educate the people we work with, even food scientists sometimes.

AF: Sometimes you do not want to add flavour, but to remove them from a product. What is your take?
PM: Taste masking does not necessarily mean removing. Sometimes yes, you can use taste-masking compounds that will interact with your bitter taste receptors, say, and block a bitterness sensation right at the molecular level. But more often you play by modulating other flavour sensations, increasing sweet, or salt. You do not remove, but hide the unwanted flavour. There are several approaches towards that, but often it requires playing with the flavour environment, the food base. For me flavour chemistry is not a matter of sending samples out, but to interact with the product and learn all angles of it. A product might not need a simple flavour to be added, but perhaps it needs the sweetness level, or the pH to be adjusted. All these things contribute to the overall flavour, and thus what I like is to be in the lab and work closely with the customer and their scientists to get the flavour that they want.

AF: What kind of technologies use in flavour design?
PM: We do a bit of analytical chemistry to find out which components are part of the flavour of our target products. But being a flavourist is much more than that. It is a years-long training, to understand the raw materials, recognize them, understand them and marry them together to create flavours. Flavours are complex, because a natural extract, an essential oil or an aroma compound will behave completely differently in different environment. Not only you have to learn how to put them together, but how do it in the finished product. So it is part of science and part of art.

AF: What kind of future do you see for the flavour industry?
PM: Especially in rich countries people eat for flavour and functionality, not for survival. So, everything that has a functionality or a health benefit, will need also to have an hedonistic value. We also see a lot of cross-contamination, in this respect, coming in the mass market: we see this tendency with yogurts with added protein, beverages with added collagen and so on. Another trend is cosmaceuticals: eating to be beautiful, “beauty from within”. This is something we will see more and more, we do not have to be surprised if L’Oreal, say, will put food products on the market. And that is where we will play a role.