The science behind weird and wonderful chip flavours

Australia Broadcast Center

04-07-2025

Now for a topic very close to my heart. Chips or crisps, depending on what you call them. It doesn't feel like that long ago when you'd go to the canteen for a pack of chips and your options were salt, barbecue, salt, and vinegar, and chicken. Now, forget chicken. You can get chicken feet flavoured chips, even duck tongue.
I wanted to know how we've arrived at this, frankly, wild array of flavours. So I trundled off to Werribee in Melbourne's West to the CSIRO.
Joanna Gambetta: My name is Joanna Gambetta, um, a research scientist in the food chemistry team. Um, I work mainly with flavour and aroma compounds and also with a lot of data analysis and things like that, but mainly trying to understand, um, the drivers of aroma in our foods are in our wines, and how certain things like the environment can modulate what we actually feel in the end.
Belinda Smith: So you're the perfect person for me to talk to you this.
Joanna Gambetta: I dunno, but I'm the person who volunteered
Belinda Smith: going in. I sort of assumed that this whole process of building a flavour from scratch would be entirely done in the lab with whizbang equipment. But I'm wrong.
Joanna Gambetta: How do we get these things to taste like something else?
We usually first try to figure out what is the flavour that we want, what it is that we are trying to replicate, and one of the first steps would always be to convene a sensory panel, which is basically a group of trained panelists, which is what we call them.
Belinda Smith: These panellists are trained to describe not just what they taste, but also what they smell.
Both contribute hugely to what we call flavour. And you really want a group of people that come from all backgrounds and ages because when it comes to the ability to taste and smell,
Joanna Gambetta: there's a lot of genetic variability. Some people are more bitter sensitive than others. While there are people who are bitter, bitter blind, for example.
Or sometimes when we are going through different phases of our life, we might be more sensitive to different taste sensations than others. So kids, for example, have. A higher affinity for sweet than older people. As we age, we become more sensitive to sweetness and we can tell it apart more differently.
Or when we become even older. Some of those taste sensations doll down as well.
Belinda Smith: This whole process of breaking down flavours to synthetically rebuild them is a pretty recent thing.
Hamish Thompson: There's cappuccino Lamington, of course, which is an Australian innovation. There's Prosecco in elderberry. Um, rock four and Roast Chestnut salted caramel.
This is Hamish Thompson. There's an American one called Southern Biscuits and Gravy.
Belinda Smith: He runs the Museum of Crisps. A website that so far lists nearly 1,400 different chip flavours.
Hamish Thompson: Yeah, one called Christmas tree, which actually does apparently taste like kind of pine needles. So, you know, there, there you go.
It's a, it's a flavour sensation.
Belinda Smith: Sounds like it would taste like one of those air freshness you dangle off your rear view mirror. Hard pass. Anyway, the Potato Crisp itself has a long history dating back more than 200 years.
Hamish Thompson: They were originally invented back in 1817 by this guy called William Kitchener, and he was kind of like the TikTok [00:31:00] celebrity chef of his day.
Um, so he wrote this book called the the Cook the Cook's Oracle, which was this international bestseller. And in it he sort of describes. Potatoes fried in slices or shavings sprinkled with very little salt. So there you've got a early reference to ready salted.
Belinda Smith: There wasn't much movement on the flavor front until the mid 19 hundreds
Hamish Thompson: when, you know, you start to see the emergence of new things.
So you start to see things like, you know, um, salt and vinegar. Um, and then along comes, you know, prawn cocktail and there's. And onion and all those things. So, so those, those ones that we really kind of associate and barbecue. I think barbecue actually was the first innovation that was a US invention.
Belinda Smith: These classic flavours rained until the 1990s when advances in food chemistry meant almost any food could be reduced to its chemical components and its essence reproduced in a lab. So let's say we wanna create BRI and cranberry flavoured chips. Yes, that's a real chip flavour. You've assembled your panel of sensory superstars.
What do we do next? Dr. Gambetta?
Joanna Gambetta: get them to taste something and describe it and try to tear it apart into its different components. Is it sweet? Is it salty? Is it bitter? Um, does it smell like oranges that sit smell like, like red fruits and things like that? And once we have a map of what that food.
Tastes and smells like. Then we go back another step, and then that is where the, when the flavour chemists get involved and try to figure out, okay, where can we find this smells naturally to try and figure out, okay, what is the compound that might be driving this smell or flavour?
Belinda Smith: Very rarely is a smell or taste created by one molecule.
Take the smell of strawberry, for instance. It's created by mixing maybe half a dozen different molecules, which together create that lovely, fresh, fruity berry smell. We associate with straws, but not all flavours are so simple to build. When things get a bit complex, it's time to head into the lab, and this is where a technique called gas chromatography or GC comes in.
Joanna and I stand by this boxy instrument that a meter long. Sitting on the lad bench,
Joanna Gambetta: imagine you've got a 20 millilitre vial. You'll put some of your sample in there and you will heat it up so that you can liberate the aromas of it. Kind of like when, imagine you have a hot cup of coffee and then the vapours will carry the, the smell of it.
That vapour is actually full of little molecules that compose the, the coffee aroma, for example. So this machine pretty much does something similar, but. To a whole range of different things. We heat it up so that we could, um, get all of the goodies out into the air. And then we have, um, a particular kind of fiber where the goodies will stick to, and then we put them into the machine, and then the machine will separate them into the all the different molecules.
Belinda Smith: The vaporised molecules are pushed through a long coil pipe where they separate with each type of molecule, traveling at its own speed. At the end of the coil, the molecules hits a detector ping, which takes that signal and displays it. On a computer as a peak on a graph, a taller peak means more of that particular molecule is present.
So what do,
Joanna Gambetta: and then through software and databases that other people have, um, composed over the years, we can click on the, on the particular peak and it'll give us their name and their identity.
Belinda Smith: And even at this stage as the machine is doing its thing, there's a person right there doing the same Dr.
Gambetta points to something poking outta the side of the gas chromatography instrument.
Joanna Gambetta: So for certain things, if you see here, we've got like a, a little glass cone that is sticking out. So the whole purpose of that is that you stick your nose in it. What? And then as the compounds are coming out. So the machine will perceive them, but then for example, at minute 20, you might feel an oh, an aroma, and then you just say, Hey, this smells like green grass, for example.
So then we can look at the peak in the machine and have that recording of when you said it smells like green grass, and then tie both up and say, ah, this is one hno. It smells like green grass.
Belinda Smith: So as the machine's running. You've got someone here sniffing away as it goes.
Joanna Gambetta: Yeah, pretty much. That's it. Wow.
Uhhuh and that's, and sometimes the pig might be tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, but the person might perceive it as something like super mega intense, which is what I was saying about our nose is being incredible and sometimes just being so much more powerful that any piece of equipment that we might have.
Belinda Smith: This is especially true for very pungent molecules that are present in teeny tiny amounts beyond the capacity of a machine to pick up, but pack a really stinky punch to the human nose. Alright, let's, let's get out of the lab. Combining the human experience with laboratory technology means food chemists can then finally start building a chips flavour, starting with its aroma.
But while you might know what molecules are in a smell, you also need to know how much of each you need, because sometimes too much of a good thing is terrible.
Joanna Gambetta: So during my master's I was working with styles, which are the typical aroma of passion fruit, but this aromas while. In a very, very, very, very, very, very small concentration because they're super potent.
They're lovely, and they give you this beautiful aromas. When you have too much of it, they start smelling like cat pee. And definitely that's not something that you want your food to smell like. So once we have nailed down the aromas, then we have to start modulating also what it's gonna taste like. So.
Then we start playing with how sour, how sweet. And there are a lot of compounds that can be used to, to try and model it. Obviously salt is always super important. Sugar, the basic ones, but then we can start incorporating herbs and things like that that will also finish the picture.
Belinda Smith: There are shortcuts, you know, smokiness could be a shortcut to ham flavour, for instance. And then there's what we see the colour.
Joanna Gambetta: So when it comes to food, yes. Visual cues are super, super important because as human we are very visually driven. So colour will give you a lot of information.
Belinda Smith: There's a good reason cheese flavoured snacks are bright, yellow and meaty ones are kind of orangey red.
Joanna Gambetta: So if this was supposed to be a meat flavour snack and it wasn't kind of reddish, your brain would automatically go, dissonance, this doesn't make sense.
This cannot be meat.
Belinda Smith: All in all, there's a fair bit of trial and error to really nailing a flavour, especially a complicated one like. Oh, I don't know. Norfolk Turkey with sage and onion stuffing [00:38:00] also a real chip flavour. But Dr. Gambetta says it's not that different to perfecting a recipe in your kitchen at home.
Joanna Gambetta: And yeah, that's the whole making food process, um, in the lab. Um, there's a lot of playing around at the beginning until you get it just right and once you are happy with it, then you just standardize it and replicate it. The differences that we play with way bigger toys than you would have in your kitchen, and we do have some gadgets that help us.
Belinda Smith: And now we have this wild array of far out flavours. Peach Craft beer, anyone?
Oh, oh, no, no. That's, that's an acquired taste. So what does the Museum of Crisps curator Hamish Thompson make of all this?
Hamish Thompson: Do you know? I'm, I'm a real traditionalist, which is, this is the thing, whenever you ask somebody about their interest, they, that always kind of veer to the traditional. So I really like, um, salt and black pepper.
I think one of the things that kind of fascinates me about the weirdness of it is usually, you know, well, quite often they kinda make me cringe a bit, and I think that kind of keeps me motivated to keep looking for the, for the, for the strangest and most unorthodox flavours. But yeah, I am, I'm, I'm traditional by nature on this, on this particular subject, although I have to say, you know, like if you think about, if you think about potatoes, I mean, they're like the, they're like the best supporting actor.
Of the food, food market. You know, they're the sort of thing that can go with anything. Um, and I think that's, you know, so it's, they're like a canvas for, um, for creativity when it comes to flavour.
Belinda Smith: That was Hamish Thompson, who runs the Museum of Crisps from his regional Tassie home. Big thanks also to Joanna Gaeta, who is now a lecturer in food science at the University of Newcastle.