R&D RADIO: Natural Flavors and Taste Modulation with Lauren Senne of Imbibe

In this episode of R&D RADIO, host and food scientist Adam Yee sits down with Lauren Senne, Senior Manager of Applications and Taste Modulation at Imbibe, a drink consultancy in Chicago, to break down the real difference between characterizing flavors and taste modulation. Lauren has spent over a decade at Imbibe and more than 13 years in the flavor industry, and is a certified flavor chemist through the Society of Flavor Chemists, a certification process that takes a minimum of seven years and, realistically, closer to a decade to complete.

Adam and Lauren dig into how bitter blockers actually work at the receptor level, why describing something as simple as "cherry" or "vanilla" can mean wildly different things to different clients, and what really happens to a product's mouthfeel and flavor balance when sugar gets pulled from a formula. They also get into why flavor houses guard their formulations as trade secrets and the clean-label trends reshaping the beverage world right now.

Listen in as they discuss:

• What flavor actually is, and the difference between characterizing flavor and taste modulation
• The rigorous, decade-long path to becoming a certified flavor chemist through the Society of Flavor Chemists
• What the certification exam actually tests, including identifying chemicals by smell alone
• How flavorists learn the natural chemical building blocks behind fruit, spice, and other flavor profiles
• Why aligning on something as simple as "cherry" or "vanilla" can be surprisingly difficult with clients
• Using reference products and live tastings to get everyone in the room aligned on a flavor direction
• How bitter blockers work by binding to bitter receptors so your brain can't perceive the bitterness at all
• Why most of Imbibe's taste modulation work is exclusively natural
• Where CPG founders commonly get stuck: stacking too many functional ingredients and creating unexpected off-notes
• What happens to mouthfeel and sweetness curve when sugar is removed and replaced with stevia or monk fruit
• Beverage trends Lauren is watching: clean label, protein and fiber combinations, and clear protein sodas
  
  

Episode Links:

• Lauren Senne - Senior Manager, Applications and Taste Modulation, Imbibe LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-senne-12102558
• Website: imbibeinc.com
  
  

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• Questions or comments about the episode? Email [e-mail]
• Episode music by Super Fantastics
  
  

Creators and Guests

Host

Adam Yee

Podcast Host and Food Scientist

What is The Startup CPG Podcast?

The top CPG podcast in the world, highlighting stories from founders, buyer spotlights, highly practical industry insights - all to give you a better chance at success.

Lauren Senne
What is flavor? It's like an ingredient in your food where you're trying to impart a certain taste or aroma. Its whole function is just to make something taste like something else. It's not to add nutrition or anything like that. So a lot of times when you talk about flavor, people are talking about characterizing flavor. So like I want this water that tastes like nothing to now taste like strawberry. So that's like your classic example. Then when you start talking about taste modulation. A taste modulator is a type of flavor first of all. So it is another type. It's non characterizing. And the way it works is that it's interacting with your taste buds to change the signals that are going to your brain and making your brain think the product tastes different than it actually does without changing any of the ingredients.

00:58
Lauren Senne
So a lot of times it's just like this nice twist that you can use to make something that doesn't taste that good taste a lot better just by using flavor.

01:09
Adam Yee
Hey everyone, this is Adam Yee, food scientist and podcast host of Startup CPG’s R&D RADIO where we interview food scientists and product developers and what they do and how they can help you build your CPG business. Today I'm interviewing Lauren Senne, a senior manager of applications and taste modulation and flavorist at Imbibe Drink Consultancy company in Chicago where she leads development of flavor systems that solve real formulation challenges, from masking off notes to building complexity across beverage categories. With over a decade at Imbibe and more than 13 years in the flavor industry, Lauren brings deep bench level expertise alongside the strategic perspective of someone who has already grown with the company. From apprentice to senior leader, Lauren walks through the surprisingly rigorous path of becoming a certified flavorist and breaks down the real difference between a characterizing flavor and a taste modulation.

02:02
Adam Yee
This includes things like bitter blockers and improving sweetness. We then dig into how beta blockers actually work on the receptor level, do some really interesting sciency stuff, and why something as simple as describing a cherry or vanilla can mean wildly different things to different clients, and what really happens to a product's mouthfeel and flavor balance when you take out sugar from a formula. We also get into why flavor houses guard their formulations as trade secrets and the clean label trends reshaping the beverage world right now, from protein and fiber combos to the rise of clear protein sodas. We know there's been a huge discussion about natural flavors and how we flavor things as food scientists in recent months. This interview brings a nice understanding and transparency about what this industry is like between scientist to scientist.

02:50
Adam Yee
Whether or not you choose to use natural flavors in your products, I hope you can use this as a way to educate how we use them as food scientists and help founders make great products. Enjoy this episode, Lauren. I'm sure you'll learn a lot. Welcome back to R&D RADIO. This is your host, Adam Yee. And today I have Lauren Senne on the show from Imbibe.

03:11
Lauren Senne
Thank you. Happy to be here.

03:13
Adam Yee
So I've known you through some other podcasts that I've done, and I thought you had a great explanation on a lot of things in the drinks industry and how we flavor drinks. And so that's why I wanted you to be on this podcast, R&D RADIO, to give like a lowdown just straight from the source, so to say, of what is a natural flavor and some of the really cool tricks you guys are doing with these tools that us food scientists use to improve food products. So, Lauren, just tell me a little bit about yourself before we begin.

03:42
Lauren Senne
Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Lauren Sunny. I am the senior manager of taste modulation and applications at Imbibe. I am also a certified flavor chemist. So I've been with this company for a little over 10 years, starting with making food flavors, what we call characterizing flavors, and we'll talk about what that means. And then over the last couple of years, transitioned into leading this team that focuses more on taste modulation. So covering how do we make some of the undesirable things a little bit less obvious? How do we enhance things that we do like, about the product can definitely get into, like, what some of the key differences are as well.

04:25
Adam Yee
So how many products would you say you've worked on, like, in the past 10 years?

04:29
Lauren Senne
Oh, my gosh, Hundreds. Yeah, hundreds. Lots of different things all across the board. All different types of flavors. Pretty limited to, like sweet rather than savory, but lots of different things.

04:43
Adam Yee
Yeah, because Imbibe is a drink company, right?

04:45
Lauren Senne
Exactly.

04:46
Adam Yee
You guys help formulate drinks.

04:48
Lauren Senne
Most of our business is in beverage. We do some other non beverage things, but beverage is definitely our specialty.

04:54
Adam Yee
Very cool. So you said you're a certified flavor chemist, right?

04:57
Lauren Senne
Yes.

04:58
Adam Yee
What is that?

04:59
Lauren Senne
Yeah. So there is a certification body. They're called the Society of Labor Chemists. And their goal is to really just provide standards and education in the industry. So they oversee this certification program to pretty much just ensure that all flavorists have a certain baseline understanding of the industry and how to formulate flavors. So what it looks like is you start as a trainee working under another Certified flavorist.

05:31
Adam Yee
Like an apprentice?

05:32
Lauren Senne
Yeah, exactly. So you're apprenticing and you'll do that for a minimum of five years. During that time, you're learning all of the different chemicals that are approved for use in flavor. Where they occur naturally, how they're made, and what they smell and taste like. So after that five year period, you are able to apply to take a certification exam. And so you'll take a written exam, you'll do an interview, and then you will smell different chemicals and have to like identify them based on what they smell like, which is probably the most intimidating part.

06:07
Adam Yee
Interesting. What's an interview like for this type of test?

06:10
Lauren Senne
The interview I thought was like the most approachable part. You sit with a panel of other flavorists who have already done this and they just ask you questions. Some of it is more like in depth versions of the written exam questions where they might ask you for more information or to go into more detail. And then some of it is just like trying to understand your day to day process, understanding, like how you approach formulating flavor and just getting into some of the details of your ways of working.

06:40
Adam Yee
So this is quite a rigorous process, right, to become a certified flavor chemist?

06:44
Lauren Senne
It is. So I mentioned you do that test at five years, then again in two years you're eligible for another test that is your final test to become like a full certified flavorist. So if you pass that, then you are done testing. You're eligible to mentor new flavorists going forward. So it does take an absolute minimum of seven years as an apprentice. But by the time you wait for your exams to get scheduled and stuff, it tends to take people about a decade, realistically.

07:15
Adam Yee
God, that's crazy. In terms of like the magnitude of things you have to like test. Right. You, you mentioned like learning about the different compounds and learning about how safe these compounds are. I'd love to just give us a snapshot about like the things you have to know.

07:27
Lauren Senne
Yeah, so I mean, I mentioned like having to recognize them. I think that's the hardest part. So like leading up to my exam, I had hundreds of these little bottles of chemicals all over, like my coffee table. And my husband's quizzing me. I'm like, what does this one smell like? The purpose of that is so that when you encounter them in a food flavor or in a food, you recognize them and are able to pick them out and make adjustments. You also need to know a lot about how flavors are processed, that you can make intelligent formulations for different applications and choose things that are going to be heat stable and resistant to whatever shelf life needs.

08:09
Lauren Senne
You have all of those types of things, then you're going to learn a lot about, like, what chemicals naturally occur in different types of foods as well. So, like, what makes an orange flavor taste like an orange flavor, what things naturally occur in a watermelon, so that when you're making up those concoctions in the lab, you have that foundational knowledge either to follow and make something that feels true to fruit or to embellish certain notes and make things that are a bit more candy like, or fantasy inspired.

08:42
Adam Yee
Wow. So you can like smell any product and kind of pick up the notes and then you can figure out a few things about it, right?

08:50
Lauren Senne
Yeah, definitely. I definitely notice if, like, there is a weird flavor in something I'm consuming where like one chemical is sticking out that can be kind of distracting. But otherwise it's fun to just like, consume, see what other flavorists are coming up with. Because there really is no one way to make a certain profile. There's a lot of room for creativity, everybody. Each flavorist could try to go in the lab and make a strawberry and come out with something totally different than their peers. And I think that's something that's really cool about it. A lot of room to be creative. A lot of different materials you can choose. It is. Everyone's taste is so individual, so there's space for all of it.

09:27
Adam Yee
Yeah. So speaking of like, creativity, you do get a lot of people with creative ideas, right?

09:32
Lauren Senne
Oh, yeah, absolutely.

09:33
Adam Yee
I'd love to hear some examples of like, some of the drinks that you've kind of been approached by and the complexities of talking to maybe a client to get to the right, like, point or getting the right flavor profile. I'd love to learn some of that.

09:47
Lauren Senne
Yeah. You know, you got approached by all different types of customers. Like some. Maybe they have an R and D or technical background and they know really well, like, this is technically possible. These are the claims I want to make. These are the ingredients I want to use. And here's how I describe everything in a way that, like, makes sense to you and that's great. Love when that happens. That makes things really straightforward, but that, like, realistically doesn't happen that often or all the time. A lot of the customers come to like an R and D house, like in buy because they want help from experts on formulating their products.

10:23
Lauren Senne
So it is not uncommon at all to either get like a laundry list of like, here's all the ingredients I want to try and all the claims I want to make, and I want it to be natural and clean, label and all of these things, and then have to sit with the customer and talk about some of the technical limitations and provide some suggested paths forward. It's also pretty common for a customer to come in and think they know exactly what they want. And when they really taste it in practice, or they see the price tag associated with it, then there's a pivot and you help walk them through that as well. Even getting aligned on, like, something as simple as, like, I want this to taste like cherry can be really complicated because like I said, like, everyone has a different standard.

11:11
Lauren Senne
Maybe I'm talking about the cherry candy that I had when I was a kid that I loved. You're thinking about like a fresh picked cherry. So how do we share that vocabulary and like, meet in the middle?

11:24
Adam Yee
Yeah. And that's more common than we think when it comes to almost any flavor, right?

11:27
Lauren Senne
Totally.

11:28
Adam Yee
Vanilla has several different types of flavor. Like what, bourbon vanilla, French vanilla.

11:34
Lauren Senne
Yeah. You've got even just like vanilla extracts alone. You've got your bourbon, you've got Indonesian, you've got Tahitian. They're all different. And then you add like the custardy vanilla, the French vanilla, like all those different types. You think vanilla is like, so simple. We use it to be like, you say something's vanilla, it means it's boring. But like, there's a lot of nuances. And it actually is really challenging to make a good vanilla flavor because it's subtle and there's like, not that much room for off notes and things to hide.

12:04
Adam Yee
Yeah, 100. And also strawberry, Right. You can get like fresh, fixed strawberry. You can get a more juicier strawberry. And I've had a strawberry project where like, I don't think the client was very unclear about like, what strawberry wanted. And something that was I learned as a trick was like, do you have a reference strawberry or do you have a reference product that you like that we can try to match it, right?

12:24
Lauren Senne
Absolutely. Yeah. That is like, probably my first line of defense. If we have a customer that really either they can't explain any of the nuances of the profile they want, or perhaps there's multiple people in the room and they're disagreeing on the type of profile, it's like, okay, go out. Either we'll recommend here's some products that are kind of diverse profiles, go taste them, or we'll ask them each to get a reference that they think embodies what they're looking for. Everybody tastes it. We'll often suggest like a live tasting with them so we can hear how they're describing the profiles and get aligned with like the way that they talk about their flavor. And that often helps people make a decision actually tasting something versus just like abstractly describing something they want to taste.

13:16
Adam Yee
Yeah. If you want to go super advanced, there are even some exercises. Right. Like I recall when I was in bigger companies, something called napping. Right. Where you get like 10 different strawberry products, let's say, and you have an X and Y graph and then you put the products in certain quadrants and you have an expert, like a sensory expert kind of tell you where your product might be good at, right?

13:37
Lauren Senne
Yeah, definitely.

13:39
Adam Yee
And depending on the client sentiment.

13:41
Lauren Senne
Yeah. If you're looking to take like a more data driven approach, that's a really excellent option.

13:45
Adam Yee
I haven't done that in a long time, but it just reminded me those are really fun to do.

13:48
Lauren Senne
A lot of times it doesn't take like anything that extreme because usually as soon as people like react to something, they're like, I know, I hate this one, I know, I like this one. Make it like this, but change this one little thing and then you're good to go.

14:00
Adam Yee
Yeah, for sure. You also mentioned something called taste modulation in kind of your intro, right?

14:05
Lauren Senne
Yeah, absolutely.

14:06
Adam Yee
We talked a little bit about it through prior kind of projects. I thought you had a really good explanation of what it is and I think it's a really good tool for like founders and brand owners to understand.

14:16
Lauren Senne
Totally. So I think it helps to talk about what is flavor. Right. It's like an ingredient in your food where you're trying to impart a certain taste or aroma. Its whole function is just to make something taste like something else. It's not to add nutrition or anything like that. So a lot of times when you talk about flavor, people are talking about characterizing flavor, which is what we've been talking about the whole time. It's exactly what it sounds like. So like, I want this water that tastes like nothing to now taste like strawberry. So that's like your classic example. Then when you start talking about taste modulation. A taste modulator is a type of flavor, first of all. So it is another type. It's non characterizing.

14:59
Lauren Senne
And the way it works is that it's interacting with your taste buds to change the signals that are going to your brain and making your brain think the product tastes different than it actually does without changing any of the ingredients. So a lot of times it's just like this Nice tool that you can use to make something that doesn't taste that good taste a lot better. Just by using flavor, it might be making something taste sweeter than it is, enhancing certain characteristics like that, like sweetness or saltiness or flavor. Or it might be diminishing, like off notes, masking bitterness, for instance.

15:36
Adam Yee
Yes. That common term we use is bitter blockers. Can I have a bitter blocker?

15:40
Lauren Senne
Yeah, totally. Bitter blocker is like the classic taste modulator. It actually works by binding to your bitter receptors on your tongue. So your brain is not even capable of perceiving that there's bitterness there. Your body can't perceive it because that bitter receptor is not available to interact with your product. So even though you've still got all these bitter ingredients in the product, you can't taste them. It's honestly very cool.

16:06
Adam Yee
I guess when you say that like binds to the tongue, I assume you get a lot of questions saying like, is this natural? Is this something that, like, how do you explain that to people? Like, because I do think it's a little bit of foreign concept.

16:16
Lauren Senne
Of course. Yeah. So there are things on both ends, right. Like for most flavor materials, there are both artificial and natural sources. Most of what imbibe does with taste modulation is exclusively natural. Just because when you think about the types of products where you might need taste modulation, like, there is a lot of functionals that you want to mask or you're using alternate sweeteners that you need to enhance. Those tend to be those like, better for you products that consumers just demand the natural flavor. So it is very common. There are a lot of taste modulation ingredients that are great and available natural from natural sources. So you really do have a lot of options in the taste modulation space. Even if you're trying to make a natural flavor claim that's really cool.

17:02
Adam Yee
Some of the things that we kind of use, like the bitter bloggers, are that source maskers, at least on my end, or even kind of the sweetness, I don't know what you call em, but like things that help with sweetness.

17:12
Lauren Senne
Yeah. Like a sweetness enhancer.

17:14
Adam Yee
Sweetness enhancer, yeah. For let's say bitter blockers, you do get like botanical and herb that tastes really bitter. Right. Herbs are generally. Or the ones that give you the health benefits are generally very concentrated, very bitter. Right. So they can be hard to stomach without a bitter blocker.

17:28
Lauren Senne
Absolutely. Yeah. And that's. I think what we see a lot is the push right now is to make all of these products that are better for you and have all of these nutritional claims and different types of health objectives that people are trying to achieve. So every kid kind of knows this from like being told to eat their vegetables. The downside is that like a lot of the things that are healthy for us, like don't always taste the best. So your proteins, your like adaptogens, these things tend to have like some off notes, oftentimes bitterness. Maybe it's metallic, maybe it's grassy, it could be a whole host of things. But bitter blockers and other modulators can really help cover those up while still keeping the label very friendly, very clean and looking how you want it for sure.

18:20
Adam Yee
Because you've worked with a lot of products and you've worked a lot of people. What have you noticed to be a part where a lot of food entrepreneurs or people in CPG get stuck at when they're developing a product?

18:31
Lauren Senne
Yeah, I think it's very common to want to throw the kitchen sink in a product and have a lot of combinations of different ingredients that offer health benefits. It's not enough to just be like a protein shake anymore. You have to add different sources of proteins and different. Maybe this one is more of a brain boosting one or two. There's all kinds of different stuff. Right. That's happening. And so the thing to be aware of is like with each thing you add, there's probably some sort of taste trade off that's coming along with it. And when these systems are simple, like maybe there's one functional ingredient, maybe you're using sugar. It can be pretty easy to cover that up. You might just be able to cover it just with your sweetener or with your flavor that's characterizing.

19:16
Lauren Senne
But as you start to build these more complex systems with additional things to achieve all of the claims that you want to achieve, that's where you sometimes get a lot of different off notes happening for you at once. And that can be a lot more challenging to address because you'll even see like maybe you get one note masked completely and that leaves room for the other off note that was in there all along to shine. And then maybe you throw a natural high intensity sweetener on top of it and so you lose some of the just natural sweetness curve and masking abilities of sugar. Maybe you introduce some off notes that are associated with that ingredient and all of a sudden you have this cocktail of something that just.

20:01
Lauren Senne
It doesn't taste how you thought it would and you don't really know what to do about it. So I think that can be pretty common.

20:07
Adam Yee
No, this is a really good Point every ingredient you add to some recipe. Right?

20:12
Lauren Senne
Yeah.

20:12
Adam Yee
Does change it dramatically because food interacts. It's not just like adding and you'll get something. Right. Food interacts in so many different ways. And we're just talking about flavors right now, like protein, fat, carbs. Like water is a big one, right?

20:27
Lauren Senne
Absolutely.

20:28
Adam Yee
These are all huge factors of like, how a product changes when you want to add something with a little. Without much thought, in a sense, right?

20:35
Lauren Senne
Totally. Yeah. They interact with in all kinds of ways. Sometimes in ways that are kind of unpredictable. Yeah, it is. It's probably the biggest advice I can give when dealing with a system like that is like looking at it holistically and whether, like, you're equipped to do that or you can work with somebody. That is because you want to understand where all of the challenging pieces that you're working with are coming from. You want to understand, like, if I pull this lever, what happens. Looking at each variable in isolation and understanding of some of the challenges, your product might not just be coming from the things that you're adding, but from the things that, like, you're trying to remove. So we talked about sugar being a great masker and mouthfeel enhancer. Fat is as well.

21:17
Lauren Senne
So you also might want to consider, like, the things that you've stripped away in an effort to maybe make your product more healthy. And how can we build some of that sensation back?

21:26
Adam Yee
Let's do a little fun little game. So obviously a lot of juices and sodas have sugar in it, right. And people want to take out the sugar. What happens when you take out sugar from a formula? And I guess I deal with some high intensity sweeteners or other sweetener systems and sometimes they're hard to match, right?

21:42
Lauren Senne
Absolutely, yeah.

21:43
Adam Yee
Could you just describe generally what you've seen when people want to remove sugar, which I assume you have a lot of projects that want to remove a lot of sugar.

21:50
Lauren Senne
Oh, yeah, it's very common. So first thing that is probably the most obvious is, right, it's less sweet, but the less obvious thing is you lose a ton of body and mouth feel as well. So it's going to feel thin. And what that can sometimes lead to is things that body and mouth feel were covering up maybe are now exposed. That could just look like weird holes in your profile where there's just a gap in the flavor. It could look like an off note coming out. And then obviously, because you're lacking that sweetness, you're going to probably build it back with some other non caloric Sweetener,.

22:27
Adam Yee
I would assume, like, let's say stevia or monk fruit.

22:30
Lauren Senne
Exactly. Those are probably our two biggest that we'll see. And while those products have come a long way, they come with their own challenges. Like, sugar is your gold standard for sweetness. And the goal with those high intensity sweeteners is to get them as sugar, like as possible. That doesn't happen by accident. So you add a stevia, and now all of a sudden you might have some sweetness peaks instead of that nice kind of bell curve.

22:56
Adam Yee
But you'll come up all in front, right?

22:58
Lauren Senne
Yeah.

22:59
Adam Yee
Instead of like spreads out.

23:01
Lauren Senne
Or you might get a ton of intense linger. Depending on your usage, you might get some metallic or some bitterness. Some people are really sensitive to stevia and licorice notes or things like that. Monk fruit, also challenging. It has a bit more characterizing flavor than stevia. So you might, at higher levels, start to get like some tea like notes. People might describe it as or like dried fruit, so it can enhance those types of things. Similar deal with having that linger. So a lot of consumers can't necessarily pinpoint, oh, I hate the linger on this product or whatever, but they can tell that it's not sugar, like, even if they can't describe it to you.

23:43
Adam Yee
Yes, yes.

23:44
Lauren Senne
A lot of what you'll see when you pull back sugar and try to build back with something else is a subtle. Like it's not just quite right.

23:51
Adam Yee
It's not quite right. Yeah. It's uncanny Valley, right? In a sense, yes.

23:55
Lauren Senne
A hundred percent uncanny Valley is exactly it.

23:58
Adam Yee
Love it. We're gonna wrap up a little bit here. I'd love to hear some of the trends you've been noticing in the drink sector that you find really interesting.

24:05
Lauren Senne
Totally. So definitely as natural and clean label as possible. Get a lot of customers even that are hesitant about putting flavor on their label or they want that transparency of like, well, can you tell me exactly what's in your flavor so that I can label it that way? And there are two reasons why we don't really do that. The first being like your flavor house, the way they make money by selling these flavors that are trade secrets. So a lot of times that's really carefully guarded IP for the company that you're working with. But the other thing that I think is, like, less obvious to people is sometimes that transparency doesn't really help you out.

24:44
Adam Yee
People ask more questions.

24:45
Lauren Senne
Right, Exactly. And like, what you might see on your label then is chemical names that sound a bit scary reality. These are chemicals that occur in all the foods we eat every day and are very safe. But people don't recognize the chemicals that make up strawberry. They just know strawberry. So sometimes that level of transparency, because it's not household names that can freak people out, even though it's safe, well vetted, and perfectly natural. The other problem with like not having flavor on your label is that you do lose taste modulation ability. So that's an ingredient that hides in that natural flavor or natural and artificial flavor declaration. So if you pull that out, then you lose some of the masking or enhancing capabilities that you might need, depending on the type of formula you're doing.

25:37
Lauren Senne
We also just are seeing a ton of like protein in everything, fiber in everything. Combinations of protein and fiber are really big, clear protein right now. So think like not your protein shake, but more of like a thinner, sessionable. They can do more fruity profiles and stuff. All really huge right now. Better for you. Everything. Better for you. Sodas, all the works.

26:03
Adam Yee
Yeah. I mean, you have to say like, poppy.

26:06
Lauren Senne
Oh yeah.

26:06
Adam Yee
Was kind of the most recent sell off. Right. Like, and it is a better for your soda that has fiber in it. And I feel like after every acquisition or big successful IPO or anything, people want a piece of the pie. Right?

26:18
Lauren Senne
Absolutely.

26:19
Adam Yee
So I can see where a lot of the influx of that comes from.

26:22
Lauren Senne
Totally. And like, part of what makes those products so good actually is like the fiber does a lot to build back some of that.

26:30
Adam Yee
Yes. The body. Right.

26:31
Lauren Senne
Yeah. Like sugar, like mouthfeels. So it's a better for you trick that actually has a lot of really positive taste and mouthfeel connotations as well.

26:41
Adam Yee
Yeah. It's a really interesting innovation. The application use of the product has been kind of one of the more innovative ones that I've seen.

26:48
Lauren Senne
Totally. Yeah. It's really cool.

26:49
Adam Yee
Yeah. Because we've used Emulin forever. Right. But I do think it was really recent that we started to use it in drinks.

26:55
Lauren Senne
Definitely. Yeah. I think they really started something and we are seeing tons of products like that come through.

27:01
Adam Yee
Interesting. Lauren, just one last question is where can we find you for advice? Or where can we find where you work so we can maybe talk to you a little bit more?

27:09
Lauren Senne
Absolutely. I'm on LinkedIn under my name, Lauren Senny. Contact me there. Also, if you're looking formulation help or just any guidance, feel free to reach out to Imbibe. The website is IM V I B E I N C Imbibe Inc dot com. So, yeah, happy to answer any questions or chat with people who want to talk flavor and taste modulation.

27:33
Adam Yee
Love it. Well, thanks so much Lauren for being on the show.

27:36
Lauren Senne
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

27:39
Adam Yee
Thank you for listening to Startup CPG's R&D RADIO. I hope you guys enjoyed this conversation. We've now arrived together at the end of another episode of the Startup CPG podcast. I'm proud to be part of the team that's part of the top globally ranked podcast in cpg. As you may know, we're not just a podcast, we're a community of brands and experts and you should join. You can sign up @startupcpg.com and you'll then get invited to our online Slack community and be informed on great guests and amazing networking opportunities to get you in front of buyers, investors, brands, and more. Thank you for listening and have a great day.