How Do Those Potato Chips Taste?

By Robert G. McGregor, Sales and Marketing Manager, Brookfield Engineering Laboratories Inc.

Flavorings of every imaginable taste have taken over the chips market. Once upon a time, there was only salt and pepper. Now you see new flavors on the supermarket shelf almost every year. If you travel inter­ nationally, there are local flavors that you may run into which you would never even see in your own country.

One of the important factors to success for companies in the flavors business is their ability to prototype new tastes in small batches and provide them to a key customer for evaluation. A dilemma that can slow the wheels of progress is the failure of the prototype flavor, usually in powder form, to flow successfully in the customer’s process. This results in the need to reformulate and get another batch together as quickly as possible. The bottom line is a loss in time to market, plus the added R&D expense of doing things a second time, usually with the addition of a flow additive to facilitate better flow behavior.