Chocolate by Design: What if We Designed Flavor in Time & Not Just in Taste

Barry Callebaut has just unveiled Flavourcode, a new approach that guides the fermentation of cocoa beans to bring out flavors the company says have stayed hidden in the bean, without adding any flavorings. That is a pretty interesting sensory development. 

The first chocolate to use it, a 70% dark called Callebaut Flavourcode 01, is described as opening with passion fruit, pineapple, mango and ripe banana, moving on to dried fruit, and finishing with cocoa.

Being something of a chocolate lover, my first reaction was, please can I try some? My second reaction, now with my sensory scientist hat firmly on, was to see the flavor journey held within that description. Barry Callebaut is talking about product experience and how the sensory characteristics change and develop over time.

What is super interesting is how Barry Callebaut says it starts with a desired taste profile and engineers backwards through the use of fermentation to translate that target into a recipe. So, the flavor journey isn't an accident of the bean. It's being designed. An opening, a middle and a finish, each chapter planned.

And that is product experience in a nutshell. The attributes a product exhibits, which ones arrive first, how strong they are, how they overlap and how long they linger, are what take a consumer on a journey. 

Add aroma, texture, melt and mouth-coating, and the picture becomes more complex still. Texture is especially important here, although it is frequently overshadowed by flavor. Flavor tends to have sharper elbows.

How quickly a chocolate fractures, softens and melts will influence when aroma and taste compounds become available. The extent to which it coats the mouth may change how long particular sensations remain after swallowing. The same cocoa flavor potential could therefore tell a different story in a product with a different structure, fat composition or melting behavior.

And we haven’t yet considered appearance, packaging, product name, claims and all the other cues shaping what somebody expects to experience. Which brings us to the challenging bit. How do you capture a journey? How do you quantify dynamic sensory attributes?

You need a dynamic temporal sensory tool. One that can track what stands out at each moment, from first bite through melt to the finish, so you can see when the tropical notes peak, when the dried fruit takes over, and how long the cocoa finish stays with you. Not just what is there, but when it appears and how it fades.

At MMR, our panelists are trained to recognize and describe attributes consistently, and to abstract the objective from the subjective, so they can tell you which attribute is there, how strong it is, when it arrives and how long it stays. That is surprisingly hard for untrained tasters to do.

Trained sensory panels decode product experience. They give clients diagnostics rather than opinions. Which attributes define the journey? Does it match the journey you intended? Does it hold from batch to batch, origin to origin and season to season, which matters when a product promises consistency at scale? And where has a reformulation, a new supplier or a change in the harvest quietly bent the route on that journey?

So, back to my first reaction. Yes, I would still love to try some. But if someone has designed the opening, the middle and the finish, then someone needs to check that every chapter is delivered, every time. That's what our trained panels at MMR Sensory Science Centres do. We read the journey back, chapter by chapter, so brands know the story consumers taste is the one they wrote.

Now, about that sample... Drop me a line and we can talk more.