There’s never been a more exciting time to be a culinary adventurer, but when figuring out the next great flavor that consumers will love, where does one even start? How can the industry identify international flavor trends and predict which ones are soon going to take off?
First, it helps to have someone with boots on the ground. I plan my travels around what I want to eat and get excited at the prospects of finding ingredients we’ve never seen before. No matter how much I plan, I nearly always come across something that I wasn’t expecting, something that energizes me and my love of food.
Let’s say my team is trying to make the best possible chicken curry soup. If our customer doesn’t have a flavor target, we research the many chicken curry options, hone in on a region, and decide which flavor profile is the best fit for their consumers and brand story. I think about what top notes I want to bring forward and whether it should be more acidic, sweet, or bitter for a more authentic profile. When I go back to the bench and start working with our master flavorist, we start recreating the defining flavor components of a the gold-standard chicken curry soup, tasting back and forth until we have successfully translated the key flavor cues. The result is a taste experience that is reflective of our inspirational travels: what we tried abroad, an ethnic market, or even at a farmer’s market. The result of this insight and iterative process is a turnkey flavor solution with a personal touch to culinary flavor bases that are easy to incorporate into large-scale operations.
In developing culinary flavor bases, we strive for versatility of approach and the ability to create high-impact solutions for your dips, spreads, sauces, soups, stocks, marinades, and glazes. I see our products as a platform to build from and specialize unique global offerings.
To learn more about culinary flavor bases that will bring your next best-selling globally inspired flavors to life, contact your McCormick account representative or contact us here today.
