Jelly Belly Flavors

Flavors are not just one compound. A very simple flavor might have 25 different compounds in it. Very complex flavors can be hundreds of different compounds. At the Jelly Belly Factory in California, researchers who study artificial flavors look more like mad scientists than candy makers.

The people that really develop flavors, the ones that are the chemists in the lab, spend seven years in an apprenticeship program learning the thousands of different compounds that go into making flavors. "If you're making an artificial strawberry flavor, you may have all the same components that exist in a natural strawberry. It's just that instead of the strawberry making them, we made them," states Sara Risch, food scientist at Michigan State University.

According to the Society of Flavor Chemists, flavorists develop flavors for a wide variety of food and pharmaceutical products, using creative and artistic talents along with various analytical tools including gas and liquid chromatography. Developing new flavors entails a lot of creativity and curiosisty. Really capturing that true-to-life flavor is very technical but also very instinctive as well.