Evil empire of food additives peels a 1000 flavors of banana

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How Campbell, Heinz Are Creating Bolder Flavors as Consumers Turn Sour on Artificial Ingredients.

In the first 90 years of making its signature product, Campbell Soup Co. developed just over 100 varieties. In the past 30 years, that number has quadrupled, and now includes soups as diverse as Thai Tomato Coconut Bisque, Philly-Style Cheesesteak and Spicy Chicken Quesadilla.

The soup smorgasbord reflects Americans’ growing appetite for food with bold and exotic tastes and textures, which in recent decades has spurred companies to add thousands of new flavorings, spices, colorings, thickeners and preservatives to their recipes, shaking up the country’s menu.

Lately, however, the technological advances that spawned multicolored breakfast cereals like Froot Loops and fat-free yogurt in flavors like red-velvet cupcake are colliding with burgeoning demand for more-natural food with simpler ingredients, which many consumers regard as healthier.

Balancing these overlapping trends is proving tricky for the food industry, which is under pressure to find reliable, inexpensive natural sources of ingredients long synthesized in laboratories.

Consumers are “looking for some fun exploration in what they eat, and from a culinary and science side, it… sets the bar much higher,” says Craig Slavtcheff, Campbell’s vice president of science and technology. “The challenge is creating these bold flavors with real ingredients.”