Alex Woo On Multisensory Eating, Innovation, and Sustainable Food
On July 30 at 10 AM, the World Taste & Smell Association is pleased to host Alex Woo in a special online presentation, Multisensory Eating & Drinking Experience: What it is and How to Create it.
Flavor is a multisensory phenomenon that involves all five senses: taste, smell, sight, sound, and touch. This engaging webinar will delve into the intricate science behind flavor creation and how it can enhance our culinary experiences. Attendees will hear how to create flavors based on crossmodal correspondence, NeuroGastronomy and NeuroFoodScience.
Stephanie Feuer, Co-Founder of the World Taste & Smell Association interviewed panelist Alex Woo, founder and CEO of W2O,a flavor technology firm which specializes in creating better food.
Alex has niche expertise in contemporary taste and smell neuroscience, and state-of-the-art clean-label plant-based sweeteners and flavors. His impressive career includes roles as Chief Science Officer, Sweeteners, for Amyris, and Chief Innovation Officer for Nascent. Alex also has a wealth of experience working for industry giants including Pepsi, Kraft, Starbucks, and Wrigley. He currently serves on the science advisory board for Olfactive Bio and Advance International, in addition to his role on the board of directors for the World Taste & Smell Association. He earned a PhD in Food Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It's common for food scientists to be chemists, but you also have a specialty in neuroscience. Can you share why this contributes to your work and how?
I have a food science background and I practiced flavor chemistry for 25 years in the food industry. About 15 years ago, I discovered neuroscience and found I can apply taste and smell neuroscience to create better flavor ingredients.
Instead of only studying the aroma chemicals that are responsible for food flavor, like vanillin for vanilla flavor or nootkatone for grapefruit flavor, I believe the missing half is really our reaction to the aroma chemicals, that is “flavor perception”. A combination of neuroscience and flavor chemistry makes flavor technology more powerful.
You've worked with a lot of companies, many of the big names in food, and now you also work with some of the innovators in small food. Can you tell us about one or two of the innovative projects you've worked on?
I specialize in four areas including sugar reduction and multisensory experience. On the topic of sugar reduction, I have taken on a challenge of applying the best-tasting plant-based high potency sweetener Reb M in foods and beverages for Amyris, a precision fermentation ingredient company.
Another project I took on was creating sweetness enhancer and bitterness blocker made from sugarcane for ASR Domino Sugar. These are natural flavors that are based on neuroscience principles including receptor technologies and crossmodal correspondence.
So if I understand it correctly, your approach is unique. You're making stacks and formulations of sweeteners, and then you're applying neuroscience to encourage crossmodal correspondence to create a certain perception for people, is that how it's working?
Yes. Sugar reduction and salt reduction have the same concept of stacking. It's like building a pyramid. The first layer of starting ingredient is the most powerful, it will get you to the top the fastest. Stacking layers of flavor ingredients adds sweetness or saltiness stepwise.
Some flavor ingredients work in the mouth, we call them tastants. These are like salt substitutes and sugar substitutes. Some work in the nose - a salty smell for salty taste enhancement, or a sweet smell for sweet taste enhancement. Tastants and odorants work together through crossmodal correspondence to make foods sweeter without adding more sugar, and saltier without adding more table salt.
Lastly, stacking sight, sound and touch features could make foods and beverages even sweeter or saltier. For example, red color and round shape were found to be associated with sweet taste.
I know one of the things that you bring to your work is a consciousness of global good and an awareness of making things better for the planet. How does that play out in food?
Food is driven by current consumer megatrends. So there are two drivers. One is plant-based foods, the other is sustainability. In the past ten years there has been a migration in the world amongst consumers going from animal-based to plant-based ingredients, foods, and practices. The other one is an improvement in sustainability by migrating from animal farming to plant farming to food production without farming. These new manufacturing methods such as precision fermentation and bioconversion are more sustainable and are actually not only better for the planet but also better for you.
I think most people are familiar with plant-based products, but are probably less familiar with precision fermentation. Could you talk a little bit about what exactly that is and how that is a reduction of resources?
Precision fermentation is a special type of fermentation. It's a more controlled and with higher yield, thus a cheaper and more sustainable way of fermenting. Unlike traditional fermentation in beer or bread making, we ferment sugar into high-value and rare food ingredients that are impossible to make economically by traditional extraction of natural materials.
An example is stevia sweetener Rebaudioside M, which is the best-tasting sweetener amongst the more than sixty in the leaves. It is present at very low concentration and expensive to extract from stevia leaves. Precision fermentation is a way to produce this rare and high-value molecule for sweetening purposes.
So let's talk about multi-sensory eating and drinking. That's the subject of your presentation on July 30th for the W TSA. Is it true that Taylor Swift’s music can make take-out taste better? Can you talk a little bit about sound and flavor?
That's a fun fact which was reported once. What is more frequently reported and confirmed by many researchers during the past ten years is the effect of sound on taste. There were neuroscience studies that proved a high-pitched sound made a sweet beverage you're drinking seemed sweeter. And low-pitched tones made a bitter drink like coffee seemed more bitter.
This was an example of crossmodal correspondence, which is the foundation for multisensory experience. Each sense - taste, smell, sight, sound and touch - is called a modality. Crossmodal correspondence means these five senses integrate in our brain to form flavor in foods and beverages.
Another example for sound-taste crossmodal correspondence is beer drinking. The right kind “beer music” in the background, made not only the beer drinking (the experience) better but also the beer (the product) better in another study.
I know that restaurants employ so many of these techniques to enhance everybody's experience. For people like me who suffer from smell and taste loss and distortions, a multisensory approach is really crucial to keeping meals enjoyable. If it doesn't look good, it's not gonna taste good to me because things don't often taste good to me. Can you share a couple of tips for people who want to enhance their own mealtime?
You can try to create foods that could be less affected, theoretically. There was a study that found on the airplane when our basic tastes (sweet, bitter for example) were affected by the stress, the humidity and the constant white noise, umami taste (deliciousness, from glutamate) was the only basic taste that's not affected.
So I hypothesize that for people with anosmia and ageusia, creating foods with umami taste by using ingredients from cheese, mushroom, seaweed, or tomato could be a solution for ageusia.
You can also design foods that emphasize other senses: sight, sound and touch. Touch (oral somatosensation, or mouthfeel) includes thick, silky, creamy, crispy or chewy. So foods with high and attractive mouthfeel could be another way to make foods suitable for people with taste and smell challenges.
That’s crucial for people not just who lost smell from COVID, but so many people who undergo chemo and they lose their ability to taste. As you grow older, your sense of smell fades and that impacts your taste. Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, too, and so many medications have a side effect that impact taste and smell
So the work that you're doing and the information that you're sharing is really important to people who are trying to come up with coping strategies. Thank you for sharing that.
You know, that's why we have the World Taste & Smell Association, right? We're promoting the awareness on the positive side, like a multisensory eating experience. We are also promoting strategies in how to improve quality of life while living with anosmia and ageusia. I'm happy to be part of the journey with you all.
Hear more from Alex Woo on Multisensory Eating and Drinking on Tuesday, July 30 from 10:00 – 11 am EST.
