New Jersey September 2024 SFC Meeting (#468) – Elizabeth, NJ

MEETING NOTICE

468th Meeting of the Society of Flavor Chemists, Inc.

Wednesday, September 25th, 2024

Newark, NJ

11:30am-6:00pm EST

The Hilton Newark Airport

1170 Spring St., Elizabeth, NJ 07201

***Please note this is a WEDNESDAY meeting***

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

8:00 – 10:00 am SFC Board of Directors Meeting

10:00 – 11:45 am SFC Board and Committee Chairs Meeting

11:30 – 1:00 pm Meeting Registration

12:00 – 1:00 pm Buffet Lunch

1:00 – 1:45 pm CSA Speaker: Siobhan Twohig and Jessica Messina, Robertet

Robertet Ingredients Innovations: Exploring Fluid Extracts for Enhancing Flavor

Robertet will be showing a Tomato Juice without and then with the addition of kiiNotes (Fluid Extracts). The presentation will discuss using fluid extracts in beverage and sauce applications and will feature 5 different kiiNotes as well as one of their Capsicums. Robertet will talk about the trending factor of Country of Harvest, and how consumers are pushing for traceability and fair farming practices.

1:45 – 2:30 pm Dr. Joel Mainland, Monell Chemical Senses Center

Digitizing Olfaction: Predicting Odor Perception from Molecular Structure

If you have a modern phone, you can capture a visual scene as a photograph, alter it, send it to a relative in another country in an instant, and store it so you can look at it for years to come. None of this is currently possible in olfaction. In vision and audition, we know how to map physical properties to perception: wavelength translates into color and frequency translates into pitch. By contrast, the mapping from chemical structure to olfactory percept is poorly understood, limiting our ability to describe and control odors. This, in turn, limits our ability to understand how the olfactory system encodes perception. Olfaction has a higher dimensionality than the other senses, but recent models have shown that with enough data, machine learning techniques can predict human perception from molecular structure. We hypothesized that the rate-limiting step for building a model that predicts human perception from molecular structure is the collection of high-quality psychophysical data. Here I will discuss our work towards predicting the intensity and character of both single molecules and complex mixtures. This will allow us to predict the odor of novel molecules and mixtures and paves the way toward digitizing odors.

2:30 – 2:45 pm Break

2:45 – 3:30 pm Dr. Natalie Berenstein, Food Writer and Historian

When the Society of Flavor Chemists was founded in 1954, the flavorists’ job description – and the future of the profession – was, in many ways, still TBD. In the decades to come, GC/MS and other technologies would vastly expand what was known about flavor, leading some to predict the imminent extinction of the flavorist. Yet the professional flavorist not only survived, but advanced – by expanding technical command and expertise, and, just as important, by providing creative and innovative solutions.

Now, seventy years later, AI-driven generative technologies promise – or threaten? – to revolutionize creative work, including in the flavor industry. What will this mean for flavorists? And can past history provide any guidance for the road ahead?

3:30 – 4:15 pm Grant Dubois, Alemandra

History of Stevia and Changes Over Time

Stevia sweeteners, consumed by the Guarani Indians of Peru and Brazil for centuries, were first described by Spanish botanist Pedro Jaime Esteve in the 1500s and described in detail in 1899 by the Swiss botanist Mosè Giacomo Bertoni, thus leading to the plant name Stevia rebaudiana (Bertoni). The history of chemical structure determination of stevioside, the principal sweet component of the common cultivar as well as the discovery of more than 40 steviol glycosides including rebaudioside A (REBA) and rebaudioside M will be discussed. Almendra manufactures an ultra-pure REBA product known as Steviose 100TM as well as several other REBA products. Stevioside is disadvantaged by bitter and licorice off tastes. An early solution to this problem, developed in the 1970s, was glucosylation with cyclodextrin glucosyl transferase to yield complex mixtures of glucosylated steviol glycosides (GSGs). Almendra manufactures several GSGs as SteviaromeTM products used as taste modulators as well as sweeteners. The major problem with stevia sweeteners, as well as all High-Potency Sweeteners (HPSs), is objectionable sweetness linger. At Almendra, based on a hypothesis of the bio-rationale of sweetness linger, we have substantially solved this problem by formulation with synergistic compositions of nutritionally-important mineral salts (System GTM). Serendipitously, in the course of our work, we found that formulations of our mineral salt / HPS compositions exhibited a striking sugar-like mouthfeel. Thus, we are able to formulate stevia sweeteners, or any HPSs, with System GTM to provide zero-calorie sweetener systems with remarkable simulation of sugar taste. Finally, in recent work, we have found that System GTM can also be used with stevia sweeteners in baked goods, frozen desserts and confections to provide products with taste qualities equivalent to or exceeding that of sugar-sweetened products. The sensory properties of selected beverage and food product formulations will be discussed. Results on selected beverage formulations have been published.

4:15 – 5:00 pm SFC Business Meeting (members only) – In person and via Zoom

5:00 – 6:00 pm Cocktail hour

ATTENDEE INFORMATION

Meeting Registration: Online registration open now.

Please go to the Eventbrite Link or SFC Website to register.

$150.00 Member / Non-member

$75.00 Retired/Emeritus/Student w/ID

Deadline for online registration is Friday, September 20th, 2024.

To attend this meeting virtually click the link below to register and attend the meeting on September 25th at 4:15 pm.

September 25 Zoom Business meeting link

Meeting/Hotel: The Hilton Newark Airport

1170 Spring St., Elizabeth, NJ 07201

908-351-3900

Deadline for SFC rate is September 3rd. Please call the hotel and mention SFC meeting for booking.