Printing edible strips. Credit: Jay Minkoff, First Flavor Inc.
Inspired by Willy Wonka’s lickable wallpaper, First Flavor, a 2-year-old marketing firm, brings new meaning to "try before you buy." First Flavor applies “edible-film technology” (used in Listerine breath strips) to market products like potato chips and oatmeal.
“The idea is to drive the trial of that product by getting people to taste it first,” says Jay Minkoff, President and CEO of First Flavor. The company has not disclosed its clients, but Minkoff says, “We’ve got two dozen companies that we’re in active product development with.”
First Flavor’s edible strips have the look and feel of a thin piece of plastic. They dissolve in your mouth and are designed to recreate the flavor and experience of eating a particular food. The marketing strategy is part of a trend known as "multi-sensory branding," where customers get to smell, taste, or feel the product before they buy.
In December, the California Milk Processor Board, for example, ran a “GOT MILK?” campaign that included posters in bus shelters that wafted the aroma of fresh-baked cookies. (The ads were quickly pulled after some complained that the strong-smelling posters exacerbated asthma attacks, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.)
Here's the science part: Matching a flavor doesn’t mean matching the ingredients. “It’s the human perception of the flavor,” Minkoff explains. To begin the matching process, the flavor house that First Flavor works with—David, Michael & Co. in Philadelphia—assembles an expert panel, “individuals with a high degree of taste acuity,” Minkoff says. These super-tasters work with chemists to recreate the flavor as they perceive it. Flavor houses don't start from scratch; the big flavor houses have somewhere between 25 and 50 thousand stock flavors that can be mixed and matched, but Minkoff says, sometimes a new artificial flavor has to be invented.
Another component of making edible strips is recreating the experience of eating a product. Part of First Flavor's service is creating a custom film for every product. For example, Minkoff explains, if his company is replicating a cola, they will opt for a film that dissolves quickly. “In the case of the apple cinnamon oatmeal, we wanted something that lingered a little bit. As you were eating it, you first taste the apple, then you taste the oatmeal flavor and then the cinnamon kicks in. So we would use a film base that dissolves slower,” Minkoff says.
LISTENING STATION: SOUND BITES
JAY MINKOFF
PRESIDENT AND CEO
FIRST FLAVOR, INC
BALA CYNWYD, PA
The film bases are made of hydrocolloids—a molecule that holds water, but also dissolves in the presence of water. They are often used as thickening agents; Jello gelatin is a hydrocolloid. Cellulose is also a key ingredient of the film. “We just discovered a type of cellulose that is four times more soluble than the pullulan that the Listerine breath strips use,” Minkoff says, adding that this new (undisclosed) base would be ideal for creating quick bursts of flavor.
There are some products, Minkoff admits, that might not be well suited to his company’s edible strips—at least not yet.
“Savory flavors are very difficult.” The meatiness was not hard for the flavor house to replicate, but getting the flavor to taste good on a dissolvable strip was another matter. “A potato chip tends to have a burnt, savory and salty type of a base and then add the meat to it—it might be nice with a crunchy potato base, but when you actually put it on a piece of edible film, you kind of wanted to spit it out.”
First Flavor hopes to apply the technology to more than just food products—the company is experimenting with creation of edible strips for alcohol and medicines, so you can taste products with active ingredients, like cherry cough syrup, before you buy.
According to Minkoff, creating flavor strips is much cheaper than providing samples in stores, which costs $600-$800 per thousand people. “With our product, the cost would be about $70-$100 per thousand people.” But will they sell the product? The jury is still out. First Flavor has a patent pending that covers the use of edible film for this area of taste sampling and taste marketing. Minkoff says: "Our patent is fairly broad and would really prevent anybody from being in this competitive space.”
-Flora Lichtman
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