New Jersey has become a hub for flavorists. And if you've eaten food from a box in America, you've certainly tasted their work
From left: Elaine Kellman of Citromax, Alison Freedman of Firmenich, Marie Wright of ADM, Belayet Choudhury of Savorx, and Alexandra Nicoletti of Robertet. Photo: Jake Chessum What does a strawberry taste like? It depends. Do you mean a fresh strawberry, a ripe strawberry, a jammy strawberry? Because it matters, says Elaine Kellman, a flavorist at Citromax in Carlstadt, New Jersey, who has spent the past 30 years breaking down taste sensations into their chemical parts.
There are, by most estimates, only about 500 flavorists in the U.S., and if you have eaten food from a box in America, you have certainly tasted their work. Flavorists are responsible for the end of the ingredients list, the mysterious “natural and artificial flavors” that make ketchup taste ketchup-y and imitation meats meaty. And many of them happen to work in New Jersey, which has become a hub of American flavor. The Swiss giant Firmenich, for example, has its U.S.
Despite the industry’s influence over what we eat, “most people don’t know about us,” Kellman says, and that is on purpose. Flavorists cannot tell you which food brands they’ve worked with or what flavors they’ve made. “We’re invisible creators,” says Alison Freedman, a flavorist at Firmenich. She remembers the thrill of seeing the first of her flavors go to market — a sweet brown caramel flavor for a CPG company, but “we can’t really get into details further than that.
Because of the secrecy, when a flavorist talks to another flavorist, certain lines don’t get crossed. “We can share general things but not the secretive things that we’re working on,” says Belayet Choudhury, an industry vet. At the same time, there is deep camaraderie, because flavorists share a very particular approach to experiencing the world: nose-first. Smell, more than taste, determines flavor, and they spend their careers learning to smell.
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