Flavors Overview Chromocell’s core competency is in discovering and developing Flavor Promoters ™ to enhance or reduce aroma and taste sensations. Leveraging our pioneering Chromovert® technology, we put human biology to work and use natural cells expressing native human taste receptors to discover novel flavor substances, with a focus on natural compounds. Strong sourcing, extraction and separation capabilities enable us to effectively isolate substances from edible, globally sourced materials and build proprietary discovery libraries. Our comprehensive flavor efforts cover compound library development, identification of human flavor receptors, flavor receptor-based assay development, high-throughput cell-based screening, sensorial validation and optimization of hits for commercial viability as flavor ingredients.
Just as music is a combination of tones from various instruments, flavor is made up of more than just one molecule. Flavor results from a concert of taste, aroma and mouth feel sensations. And just like the various ways an audience will interpret music, flavor will mean different things to different people - acceptance, pleasure, indulgence, palatability or refreshment. Above all, though, the purpose of flavor is to provide individuals with an improved feeling of contentment and help them stay healthy in ways such as eating fewer calories or consuming less salt with no trade-off in taste or aroma. Our goal is to enable a pleasing sensation for consumers that will leave them with an improved state of well-being and satisfaction.
Flavor Programs Chromocell’s efforts in flavors are focused on discovering and developing natural Taste Promoters that enhance or reduce sweet, bitter, salty, savory (umami) and sour taste sensations in consumer goods. Our Taste Promoters provide competitive advantage and product differentiation through enhanced taste, improved nutritional profile, cost of goods savings and flavor ingredient exclusivity.
Our Sweet Taste Program is focused on the discovery and development of natural sweeteners and natural sweetness enhancers addressing caloric sugars (glucose, fructose and sucrose) as well as various high potency sweeteners (e.g. steviol glycosides from Stevia leaf). We strive to enable innovative food solutions based on calorie–reduced or calorie-free products that taste like their full caloric version.
The goal of our Bitter Taste Program is to block or reduce the bitter and other undesirable tastes associated with certain food products and health-promoting ingredients. Having all 25 human bitter receptors available for high-throughput screening we can identify specific receptor assignments to each bitter tastant and find those bitter maskers and reducers that do not interfere with other desired bitter tastants.
Our Salt Taste Program is based on a proprietary and unique cell-based assay and leverages synergies with other taste and aroma programs. The goal is to enhance the taste of salt and enable a significant reduction in sodium.
Our Taste Promoters also address the need for customized solutions by combining the taste enhancer or masker compounds found by our cell-based assays with other ingredients to create new flavors that deliver the desired taste qualities in different food matrices.
Screening Technologies and Compound Libraries Leveraging Chromovert technology, we identified naturally occurring cells that have the ability to produce unmodified, full-length taste and odorant receptors as they exist in human taste or olfactory cells, respectively, in vivo . The receptors of our cells are native, i.e. not tagged or chemically modified or truncated. When tested with known tastants, the functional response of these native taste cell-based assays mimicked the corresponding reported human sensory data across several taste modalities as confirmed by formal sensory analysis. Based on these cells, we have established automated high-throughput screening assays that use a measurable lock and key principle to identify the right candidates among hundreds of thousands of different compounds. Our diverse discovery libraries include both commercially available as well as proprietary compounds, predominantly from globally sourced natural materials with a history of human consumption. We develop proprietary natural discovery libraries by employing automated high-performance extraction and two-dimensional fractionation instruments to separate natural materials such as fruits, herbs and vegetables into their molecular components. Automated post-fractionation processing enables a rapid transfer of these components into the cell-screening assays. Sophisticated analytical equipment is used to identify the chemical structure of an unknown cell assay hit.
Collaborations Chromocell collaborates with major global food companies and suppliers on flavor innovation research. A partnership with The Coca-Cola Company , the world’s largest beverage company, was publicly announced in December 2010. The agreement with The Coca-Cola Company includes the discovery and development of sweetness enhancers, natural sweeteners and other flavor ingredients to deliver great-tasting beverages that meet the growing and changing needs of consumers.
Nutrition Overview Chromocell leverages its technology platforms not only in the flavor area but also addresses nutrition and health by focusing on functional ingredients. Functional ingredients improve the state of health and well-being and reduce the risk of disease, thus playing a critical role in improving public health. The steadily growing functional ingredient market consists of a number of key segments including dietary and nutritional supplements (nutraceuticals), functional foods and cosmeceuticals (functional personal care products). The foundation of Chromocell’s competence in this attractive area relates to our unique high-performance cell screening capabilities leveraging Chromovert and our natural discovery library. Leveraging these technical assets with our therapeutics and flavor know-how enables the identification of both new health-promoting ingredients and Flavor Promoters to reduce or eliminate off-flavor issues of functional ingredients.
