Food flavour creations

Most meat co-products have traditionally generated little economic value, with some even having a negative value due to their disposal costs, representing a significant waste. From a sustainability perspective, it is important to reduce this waste and create more value from meat co-products, especially targeting the food industry. Many of these meat co-products contain an appreciable amount of nutrients like essential amino acids, minerals and vitamins, and could be developed into higher value ingredients for a range of industries including food service. They can also be considered as raw materials for the generation of bioactives [1] and to produce extracts with excellent functional properties suited for a wide variety of food industry applications.

Novel approaches to flavour development create opportunities to develop new applications from co-products. The creation of unique flavour profiles to satisfy consumers’ continuing craving for novelty and their growing interest in flavour pairing is a major challenge for food companies. Chefs also must master the ability to develop flavours that create balance and harmony in the final product and create a complex multi-sensory experience in consumers. Traditional approaches to flavour development, whereby development chefs attempt to create new sensory experiences through applying previous experience, trial-and-error, and panel tasting, will not be able to identify the full opportunity-set of flavour combinations. This is because there are many possible combinations and interactions between the numerous chemical compounds of ingredients that largely determine how consumers experience flavour. To be able to identify and exploit this opportunity-set of possible flavour combinations more rapidly and comprehensively, traditional approaches to new flavour development need to be complemented with science-based computational approaches that are better equipped to systematically explore a large range of possible combinations of chemical compounds.