Flavorists’ Work Drawn from Palette of Chemicals : Food: The secretive business strives to add what processing takes out, generating a $750-million-a-year industry in the process.

From high-tech chicken pot pies to powdered soft drinks, a super-secret world is at work on much of our food.

The flavor industry replaces the savor we destroy, making a TV dinner taste less like cardboard.

“In processing food to get it into the form people want or to make it safe, flavor is processed out,” said Bob Pellegrino, general manager at Cincinnati-based Fries & Fries, one of the nation’s largest flavor producers.

Grandma went to her garden or market for fresh produce hours before preparing and serving it. But we expect food that waits months in warehouses and on store shelves to be popped into a microwave oven and still taste as good as grandma’s.

To a surprising degree, it does, thanks to flavorists who have created an estimated $750-million-a-year industry that helps make the food we eat palatable.

Flavorists usually are chemists who have spent several years learning to identify and duplicate natural flavors. Many say they can discern thousands of flavors--nuances such as the difference between the part of an apple near the skin and the part near the core.

The flavorist’s challenge is to restore natural flavors, no matter what processing, packaging, storing and cooking have done to them.

America’s changing lifestyle means that food processors have to compensate for flavor that used to be provided by animal fats, cream and other high-cholesterol foods that don’t fit into diet-conscious lives.

“There are a few words that are driving our industry--light or low-fat, natural and convenient,” Pellegrino said.

Flavoring agents are pervasive. Dairy products, bakery goods, desserts and beverages are laced with flavorings.

Because ingredients are listed in descending order by weight, flavoring is last because it comprises less than one-half of 1% of the weight of the product--sometimes just a few parts per million.

“That means 100 pounds of flavoring makes more than 20,000 pounds of product,” Pellegrino said. Liquid flavoring rolls out of his plant in 55-gallon drums and powders in 10,000-pound lots.

The flavor-making industry is secretive and clannish, Pellegrino conceded. A food company that markets its brand has a proprietary interest in the way its pot pie, pudding or potato chip tastes and doesn’t want anybody else to produce that flavor.

“There’s a high level of trust between the flavor company and the food and beverage company,” Pellegrino explained. “Service and confidentiality are important. We’d be out of business pretty quickly if we said we were flavoring this or flavoring that.”

He refuses to identify any brand that uses his products. But he says Fries & Fries and a competitor, International Flavors and Fragrances Inc., are among the nation’s largest, each handling about 10% of the industry’s business.

There are about 100 flavor companies in the United States, and about 80 of them belong to the Washington, D.C.-based Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Assn., according to Earl Klinger, the group’s administrator.

The association refuses to acknowledge any ranking among the industry’s companies or the volume of the business.

“We really do not know for certain,” Klinger said. “It’s not legally possible to patent, copyright or otherwise protect a formula for a flavor, so the only way one company can maintain a competitive advantage is to keep it a secret.

“I’ve heard all sorts of figures, and we really have no way of knowing.”

Flavorists like to say that they can reproduce a flavor from taste the way some musicians play songs by ear. They usually start by analyzing the chemical content of a food by using a gas chromatograph and listing the ingredients.

Then they recreate flavors in the laboratory, altering them by, for example, by making a fruit drink taste riper, sweeter or more tart.

There might be 500 components in any flavor, and it is the distinctive formulation of those components that makes one brand of soft drink taste different from another.