208 - Why “Natural Flavors” Aren’t What You Think and the Return to Real Food

10:51Ruston:Interesting. Companies nowadays, I feel like, especially kind of in the health and wellness space, they're moving away from artificial flavors. I feel like marketing is kind of picking up that those aren't the best for you. But they're still using these natural flavors. And people don't know that they're bad. We had a customer actually come in. We changed all of our packaging to say no natural flavors because we think it's amazing that we do that. We want to shout that from the rooftop. And we've had customers email customer service saying, well, is this a typo? Isn't it a good thing? You want to use natural flavors just because they don't understand.

11:20Ruston:Right. Why is that? Why are artificials becoming bad but not natural flavors?

11:25Lindsay:And that's like the progression to slowly unraveling the whole food industrialization process. this. At the beginning, like during World War II, we learned that we could like can and freeze dry and make cake mixes. And these things were meant to like save time. Minute rice, minute rice came out like 1939. And it was like a boom for housewives, you know, they had to do the cleaning and all this and they could also get dinner done in time. And then after that, there was like, you know, instant noodles and cereal. Cereal became like, hey, instead of making a real, you know, bacon, eggs, pancakes, I could just give my kids some cornflakes.

11:58Lindsay:There were only a couple of these at the turn of the century, but it became super useful for convenience, for palatability, for conformance, like everything tasted the same every time. That's not always the case with just ingredients. Sometimes we get a raspberry that's a little tartar or sometimes, you know, our banana tastes more ripe or less ripe, but they did that. So also to improve shelf life and stability, this was all shortly after the advent of the Model T Ford. So yeah, they're just trying to improve efficiency in everything? How do we cut the cost down? How do we improve shelf life and palatability?

12:34Lindsay:How do we have it taste the same every time? And when they did that, they were able to feed more people for cheaper. So that was really what they were going for. And then it got to the point where they were like, hey, how do we make people buy this food more? Let's increase the palatability. Let's add some MSG. Let's add some flavor modulators. Flavor modulators, they They are natural flavors. And literally some of them can like thin out your, the mucus membranes in your mouth to make things taste more salty or more sweet, or even have like a warm feel to it. So just as like social media is programming you to stay on social media longer, it's a good business model, right?

13:09Lindsay:Keeps you coming back. That same thing is true with, with modern food industry. If you can keep coming back, if you can reach for that bag of bag of chips, 10 minutes after you just put it down because you felt icky. Those are the same things that are programmed into food today.

13:25Ruston:Okay. Talking about modulators, flavor modulators, I didn't even know they existed until we started, was it the parazanthine drinks that we were making? And I kept telling you, like, this does not taste good. And you were like, well, I don't have bitter blockers. Celery juice, I feel like is the term. It tastes like celery juice. Parazanthine tastes like celery juice. And every time we get a drink, Lindsay would be like, nope, I can taste the celery. And it's because we don't have bitter blockers. but natural flavors have these bitter blockers.

13:54Lindsay:Yeah, not all the time. Not all of them do, but energy drinks, things that have 200 or 300 milligrams of caffeine, if you were to have 200 or 300 milligrams in 16 ounces of water, it would be very, very bitter. So yeah, it's just the food industry's way of slapping a Band-Aid on it. Hey, now you can get your caffeine and you don't even mind it. It tastes super fruity, you don't even notice.

14:15Ruston:But I bet if I surveyed 100 people that drink energy drinks and asked them if they knew there's a bitter blocker in there, they would not know.

14:22Lindsay:Well, unless you did that survey, I just agree.

14:24Ruston:No, because a lot of the time I feel like a consumer who doesn't know that natural flavors maybe aren't the best. They're looking at the ingredient list of their energy drink and it's three or four ingredients. And I feel like the marketing these days is shorter ingredient list that you can pronounce. Perfect. You're good to go. Well, yeah, I can pronounce natural flavors. There's maybe two other ingredients that I can pronounce. That's a good product. Most cases, it's most likely not. Yeah.

14:47Lindsay:And maybe that's something to do with the FDA. Maybe having it be natural flavors instead of saying what it really is, is, you know, extracted wood pulp and then we take the aromatic compounds out and distill them and then plate them on maltodextrin or some solvent. You know, maybe that's not the brand that they want to do. But according to the rules, that's not only what they can do, but it's how they have to do it.

15:10Ruston:Okay, let's talk about natural flavors, though, because you're talking about how they keep everything tasting the same. And so, Lindsay, we know everything does not taste necessary. So what do you think is our product that we've had the worst problems with? Different batches taste so good. Oh gosh, so many, but definitely strawberry anything. Which, if you picture buying strawberries at Costco, during the summer you're getting that super ripe, red, juicy strawberry. In the winter you may be getting kind of the paler color, crunchier, flavorless strawberry. We face that same problem, and that's going to reflect in the final product.

15:44Ruston:it does in oh my goodness our strawberry limeade electrolytes our strawberry protein powder what one do you think is the hardest to deal with um the strawberry i think strawberry so

15:56Lindsay:like any any fruit there's going to be at least 80 different genuses of or different subspecies of those fruits i mean like like a lemon you could have like a meyer lemon or you know there's so many different any any types of fruit any banana or sorry any apple you go to the grocery store you get like half a different 12 different apples to choose from and a granny smith doesn't taste like a jonah gold that's why it's really important for us and for our partners that we work with that we can maintain steady supply from not only the same country but the same supplier and

16:28Ruston:hopefully around the same time of year that's really hard to do super hard to do and it's

16:32Lindsay:something that we're working diligently on on trying to expand our offerings as well as get secondary suppliers so that we could keep in stock that's another thing when you use real fruit powders, sometimes there's a bad harvest. And what do you do? You know, the product is the product.

16:47Ruston:Yeah. So there was a bad harvest with strawberries for one country. And it really hurt us. Like in our strawberry limeade electrolytes, you were telling us that the cost went up a ton because of this as well.

16:58Lindsay:Yeah. It's just pure economic supply and demand. When there are only in the world a few thousand drums of organic strawberry juice concentrate, there's some big players that are always using them. And then what's left over is determined by who will pay the most and who's willing to pay the most for it. So yeah, it's definitely not cheap. You know, that's one of the biggest things with natural flavors, right? People love to taste fruit, right? People want to enjoy their food. And so if you can minimize the price either by using natural flavors or artificial flavors, that's just why people do it.

17:33Ruston:Well, I'm learning companies do it. Like you said, it tastes the same across the board. So if I were to use strawberry natural flavors, every single product would always taste the exact same. So we've got that. And then we've got cost. Because you were telling me one time that a can of my strawberry limeade electrolytes, this real strawberries were 40 cents just for one can, where if I switched to strawberry natural flavors, it'd be only a penny for that can.

17:59Lindsay:I'd be less than a penny. That's the other thing. Because they distill those compounds down to such a small amount, you're losing all the phytonutrients. You're losing polyphenols, anthocyanins. You're losing fiber. You're using what nature made.

18:14Ruston:In those natural flavors. You're not getting any of that.

18:17Lindsay:So that animals eat it and then they spread the seeds. But yeah, really, you're losing the essence of the food. It's just a fake facade.

18:24Ruston:But Carl, onto your list, I also want to add supply chain. Like when there's a bad harvest, us with using real food, there's nothing we can do. We can't go out and tell the farmers to grow more strawberries and grow them faster. But when you're using natural flavors and these more artificial compounds, you're not going to have those same supply chain issues. Right.

18:41Lindsay:Especially with artificial flavors, there's always more old dinosaur bones in the form of petrochemicals you can use to make more artificial flavors. That's not running out anytime soon.

18:49Ruston:So these artificial and natural flavors are not nourishing to the body, but real fruit, real food obviously is.

18:56Lindsay:They are very palatable, though. You know, people say, oh, hey, make a white monster flavored, you know, this, that or the other. And there's a reason why. People like kind of the more artificially, even though they are natural flavors, some of them, they taste artificial because in essence, they are artificial. They're in unusual ratios.

19:16Ruston:I'm going to call them out. I think some companies are lazy because of white monster. Everybody's wanting this white monster energy drink, right? So we came to you and now we have a second food scientist saying, everybody wants a white monster. What's in the white monster? Let's make it with real food. So I just tasted our first run of it today, but it tasted good. But he took the time to figure out what flavors they were using, mixed them together. And we're taking the real fruit of it and took the time to do that. And we're going to make it taste like a white monster.

19:47Lindsay:And it'll taste like real food though, too, because the combination they're using, they're probably using these natural flavors called, hey, this one's called grapefruit. But really, there's maybe only a couple different flavor compounds in there. But if you're to take a bite of a grapefruit, besides, you know, that awful shock tart that you'd feel up front, you would notice that there's a lot of depth to it. There's a lot of flavor beyond just the sweetness and the acidity. There are different notes. So it's a complicated science, but fake food is a lot more simplified.

20:20Ruston:Well, and like you said, they don't want to run out on the store shelves. They don't want the risk of selling out.

20:26Lindsay:No, and they will always have more natural flavors.

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21:51Ruston:Okay, we've talked about why it's really hard to use real food. That's why companies do it, use natural flavors. It's so much easier. But what's the value to the consumer? Is it really more valuable for the consumer to find the products made from real food?

22:06Lindsay:You know, speaking as a scientist and somebody who knows a little bit about human physiology, yeah, like nature, nature makes nature, right? What we can do is we can take some shortcuts, right? We can say, okay, what does a human need? Oh, he needs this much carbohydrates, this much fiber, this much protein, these vitamins and minerals. But that's not how nature provides nourishment. That's not how nutrition works. So we can break everything down to its constituent forms, but really you're missing the essence of nature and you're kind of stripping out all the things that it put in there that your body is utilizing.

22:44Ruston:So meaning when you find a product that uses real food, you're still getting the polyphenols, the fiber, the antioxidants, things like that is what you're saying. You're getting the whole component.

22:55Lindsay:Yeah, there are a lot of phytochemicals that we're still learning about. And phytochemicals are just plant chemicals that they just naturally make that are completely devoid in like a Rice Krispie treat or a cherry.

23:07Ruston:And a natural flavoring and no cherries. But phytochemicals are actually really good for us.

23:12Lindsay:Absolutely. I mean, these are the things that phytochemicals like anthocyanins, they're antioxidants. They help perform vital functions in our bodies.

23:20Ruston:Well, I have a question for both of you. But first of all, I want to tell you about, before I even knew you, one of my very first products was pumpkin spice protein powder. And I think it was like our third flavor of protein powder. And I was sitting with a food scientist and I said, I want to make a pumpkin spice protein powder for the fall. And he was like, great. And he said, we'll use a natural flavor for that pumpkin spice. And I said, no, pumpkin spice is like real spices. All you need is like cinnamons some allspice, you know, things like that. And he's like, well, pumpkin, though, is too wet.

23:51Ruston:Pumpkin doesn't do well. So we use pumpkin natural flavoring. And he said, go look at all the store shelves. You're not going to really find anything made with pumpkin and spice. It's going to be natural flavors. And I did go and look and it was made. Everything was natural flavors. Today, though, thankfully, you can find some pumpkin and spice type things. But I sat across the table from him and I was like, no, we've got to figure out how to do this. This is ridiculous. Like pumpkin spice protein powder I want with pumpkin and spice. So he finally figured it out. But like I said, I've seen more products on the market with true pumpkin and spice in it.

24:25Ruston:So are food scientists just now learning how to do this or what's happening?

24:32Lindsay:Have you seen the McDonald's burgers that people have that are like three years old and not molding? They bring them out every couple months. They show them off on YouTube. We're at this inflection point where we're like, this is not natural. This is not good. Like maybe it's good for McDonald's because they can keep their bread, you know, for two years, four weeks at a time before they have to throw them out. McDonald's don't sue me. But maybe we could make this patty that, you know, microbes don't want to touch. Microbes are good. Microbes are healthy. Not all of them. There are some pathogens and those are the ones that the preservatives are meant to stave off.

25:04Lindsay:But when you add that much preservative, when you strip away that much from the natural food, you're left with this hyper efficient but not very nourishing result. So I think at the inflection point that the food industry is at right now, we've realized what we could strip away. And now we're realizing, hey, what are the consequences of that? What do we need to put back? What are the benefits of doing so? And so just like what your food scientist said was true. In fact, if you go to like a Chili's or an Applebee's, all their food is the same. It tastes the same. They all come from the same vendors.

25:38Lindsay:There's like one or two main vendors that sell all the meat, that sell all the vegetables. If you go to these places that, you know, not even some of the mom and pops, you can't buy some of these things like farm to table unless you literally are getting them farm to table. Because if you're going to make a profit on food nowadays, you have to go through some of these big vendors and they have homogenized the whole supply chain.

26:02Ruston:Okay. So back to my question, do you Do you think food scientists are now learning how to make with real food or it's something they've always known and they're just now going back to what they've known?

26:15Lindsay:Yeah, there definitely are some food scientists that are like, oh, hey, this is what we used to do before we started using these shortcuts. But then some of the younger food scientists coming up, they don't know anything about it. They might have to look at a textbook that's, you know, 50 years old, or they might have to rely on a mentor that knows something more about it. So humans have discovered how to do it. Obviously, you know, pumpkin spice didn't come from natural flavors to begin with. It was all these things are derivatives of real natural foods that we made. So, yeah, it's really just kind of relearning and rediscovering the natural, maybe more expensive, maybe a little bit more temperamental foods.

26:55Lindsay:But yeah, it's just about relearning and finding our way to bring it to the masses.

27:01Ruston:So food scientists relearn how to make food from food. OK, but making food from food is really hard. We know. You and I have gone through tears, headaches, laughs because there's nothing else to do but laugh. Probably more stress in my life than I've ever dealt with because of trying to work with food. So in the last six months, let's say, what's been our biggest headache or our biggest stress making products from food? Which is funny because I feel like we tell a story for every product we've ever launched. But most recently, I feel like moving to our TDs, which are our energy drink clear protein cans, have been so challenging.

27:39Ruston:For example, we were using guava mango, real guava, real mango in our new sparkling electrolytes. Went to go do a pilot run with our manufacturer, and they called us 10 ,000 cans in. and we were like we cannot do this it is clogging our filters our filters literally look like a fruit leather dried hardened we cannot run your product meanwhile we've already planned our launch that's like three weeks out we've already sent out marketing we've put all this money towards this product towards this launch just to have our manufacturer say we cannot use real food your powder is gunking up all of our machines so we then had to pivot kind of last minute reformulate using different sources, still along with real food to make a product that could work.

28:22Ruston:So it is so challenging. And I honestly, I understand why companies don't do it. Yeah, when they wanted to quit on us, I wanted to cry because we had like retailers who wanted the drinks. Our birthday sale was coming up in three weeks. It was so hard. That one was really hard. Just doing our raspberry lemonade energy drinks. Recently, they just came out. Well, Well, they started running the batch. I got there. Raspberries weren't as flavorful and sweet. And so I made them add a little bit more sweetener in it halfway through the batch to help with the raspberries. And so we have half the batch that is bitter and half the batch that is sweet.

28:58Ruston:But they all still are good.

28:59Lindsay:And this isn't just us learning. This is also our co-manufacturers. Like, this is such a novel idea. Hey, let's not use natural flavors. Let's flavor with real fruit. That they had no idea. They didn't, you know, they've learned now. We've learned now. we're both better for it. Now, every time we send them something, we make sure we give them, you know, a sample of the materials to be used. But that absolutely goes to your point about the pumpkin spice. This is a relearning in the industry at large. And for you, you know, you're still pretty new to the industry, but also for these established co-manufacturers, they had no idea that they were going to encounter these problems.

29:35Ruston:You know what? You hit it spot on because when I started flavoring protein powder with real food, I actually had manufacturers come to me asking me, like, how are you doing this? Where are you getting things? Like, teach us what you're doing. And so now with the cans, it's the same thing. There's so many can lines out there that wouldn't take us, that won't take us because of using real food. And so now on the market, there are a lot of protein powders made with real food. So I'm hoping maybe in like four or five more years, there will be a lot of more cans made with real food that we won't be the only one.

30:09Ruston:I was just told this week, a company I really wanted to work with for manufacturing said that they just didn't have the time to put into making our product work on their machines. So it happens. By the pendulum swinging, people are wanting real food in their food products.

30:24Lindsay:And you're not even showing how selective we actually are because wherever possible we go for organic or grass fed or, you know, these very high standards, that shortens the supply chain even further. Because not only is it real food, but it's the cleanest quality we can get.

30:38Ruston:that is true are we allowed to say that we have had to reformulate multiple times with language the science we should tell them and our consumers would never know because we have to work so hard on the back end to make it match exactly there's been so many times i feel like we've reformulated a product and we're like wait this kind of tastes better yeah but that's not what these retailers agreed to it's not what our consumers are used to drinking on a daily basis we have to make it match exactly and that is really difficult when working with real foods one was our strawberry slush clear protein, like days before the birthday sale, we formulated with a certain strawberry crop from a certain country.

31:14Ruston:They ran out. So we had to bring in a new strawberry, but the new strawberry did not taste like what we had formulated. So we had to try to mix it with some different sweeteners and things to make it taste like the first one. And that happens all the time. And our manufacturer was begging us a couple of weeks later because they knew that the initial strawberry supply was hard to get, begging us to switch to this new supplier. It was so much cheaper. It was so much more readily available, would come to us a lot faster, and it didn't taste the same. So we had to say, no, sorry. No, and back to the other one.

31:46Lindsay:You're omitting the biggest supply chain issue, which is the fact that one of your ingredients that you wanted to use did not exist at a scale that was big enough, right? Are we talking about microgreens? We're talking about microgreens. You literally invested in a company to bring about a brand new raw ingredient.

32:04Ruston:I wanted a microgreens drink because microgreens are so nourishing. They're way less heavy metals than all these green drinks out there. And so I thought, great, let's formulate it. So we formulated it and then realized there's no one in the entire world. We checked in world that can make enough microgreens for the drinks that we need. So, yeah, we had to help a local guy grow his business to be able to provide for us. And if you are a microgreens supplier, chances are we've talked. Exactly.

32:34Lindsay:Scaling up, the idea is great, right? But like you can't make, you know, a bunch of, you know, 20 ,000 packages worth on just like grandma's microgreens or something, right? So, yeah, literally bringing a raw green to market, that is easily one of the most ambitious things I've seen a brand do.

32:52Ruston:Well, we're trying some crazy things at Just Ingredients, that's for sure. All right. Thank you both so much for being on here. and hopefully the audience, the listeners now know all about natural flavors, that it's really easy for companies to use. It's convenient. It makes everything taste the same. They're cheaper, but hopefully they also realize that using the real food is how they get those nutrients and the fiber, the vitamins, the minerals, things like that. Making food from real food is always the best option. But this season, I am ending my podcast by asking five quick questions, but you have to answer them real quick.

33:28Lindsay:You got it.

33:29Ruston:Okay, first one. What emerging health topic excites you the most?

33:33Lindsay:Gut health.

33:35Ruston:What is a piece of advice you give to your younger self?

33:38Lindsay:Figure out what you want to do sooner.

33:40Ruston:What's the one health practice you'll never compromise on, no matter how busy life gets?

33:45Lindsay:Exercise.

33:46Ruston:What is your favorite Just Ingredients product and why?

33:49Lindsay:Oh, that's a good one. I just have to choose one. Yeah. Rapid Fire Magnesium Complex. I really believe in magnesium see them as a supplement and it's a great product.

33:59Ruston:I thought you were going to say bone broth since you took so many months making that bone broth for us and it takes the least favorite now. Swing and a miss. Okay, Lindsay, what's your favorite product and why? Oh, mine is the adrenal complex because I am constantly stressed and have high cortisol and it brings me back down to earth a little bit. You know what? I can always tell when I haven't taken it and I did not sleep good last night and it's because i've missed it for no it is a one supplement i texted carlin one time because i forgot it and i said hey i needed to release some adrenal complex oh yeah to the office yeah all right and what would you say is the best ingredient to life oh i have to choose one for that

34:37Lindsay:one too um well since i'm a formulator i'm gonna add two the two most important ingredients are purpose and connection and why because you're really just going through the motions if you don't have a why for the reason you're doing everything and the people or whatever you're connecting to is irrelevant if you don't have that.

34:57Ruston:I love that. Thank you so much, Rustin, for being here. Thank you, Lindsay. Hopefully the audience likes some of our behind the scenes stories and making products and we'll share more as we go along this journey with you, Rustin. Yeah, thanks, Karlyn. That was fun. Let's do it again sometime.

35:13Ruston:Thank you for being here and being part of this community. Don't forget to subscribe to the Just Ingredients podcast. We've got so much more to share with you. And if you're not already, come join us daily on all social media platforms at just.ingredients. Until next time, keep choosing what nourishes you.