{"id":13748,"date":"2025-06-13T10:12:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-13T17:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.runwayritz.com\/index.php\/2025\/06\/13\/flavor-opener-the-spoon\/"},"modified":"2026-05-09T20:05:49","modified_gmt":"2026-05-10T03:05:49","slug":"flavor-opener-the-spoon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.runwayritz.com\/index.php\/2025\/06\/13\/flavor-opener-the-spoon\/","title":{"rendered":"Flavor Opener – The Spoon"},"content":{"rendered":"


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A stable, healthy diet won’t work on its own\u2014it needs to be unstoppable.<\/em><\/p>\n

Flavor is the most powerful force in our food system. Not nutrition labels, not health claims, not environmental impact. It’s a flavor. Gravity determines what we eat, what is produced, and what companies make billions from.<\/p>\n

Do you know how I know this? Because all industries exist because they have found a way to make food incredibly palatable, with no other usable attributes than its taste. Chips, energy drinks, candy\u2014these products don’t keep you healthy or feed you properly. They have little to contribute to a healthy agricultural system. Yet they exist because food scientists have cracked the code on making your brain crave them. And it works. These companies make billions by pushing our entertainment buttons.<\/p>\n

If junk food can build empires on taste alone, imagine what we can do with food that actually nourishes us.<\/p>\n

The Business of Happiness<\/strong><\/h2>\n

All the ingredients in the bag of chips are there for one reason: to start your reward program as hard as possible. Food scientists call these “bliss points”\u2014the perfect mix of salt, fat, sugar, and crunch that makes your brain say “more.”<\/p>\n

Companies that make healthy or sustainable foods face a different challenge. They work so hard on nutrition, sourcing, environmental impact, that they run out of bandwidth to make their products truly irresistible.<\/p>\n

Many of these companies get so caught up in their metrics and goals that they lose sight of what their product actually tastes like. They delude themselves into thinking that their product is more delicious than it really is. There’s probably an implicit assumption that a nutrition label or sustainable certification will make consumers ignore the fact that something might taste like shit. The result? Products that check all the boxes are good on paper but fail the basic test\u2014do people really want to eat them?<\/p>\n

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It is good to make healthy and sustainable food, but the eater cannot taste beauty. They need flavor. We need to be brutally honest about how our food tastes. Especially food that tries to create a positive impact on the health of people and the planet. Because if that is not a food that people want, then that product will never be seen. Flavor is the key to unlocking that effect.<\/p>\n

The success of junk food actually shows us the way forward. Taste is not the enemy of healthy eating\u2014it’s a secret weapon we don’t use enough. Instead of fighting our love for sweet food, we should make healthy eating irresistible.<\/p>\n

Breeding Flavor<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Dan Barber’s Row 7 Seed company is an example of this. By breeding vegetables primarily for flavor first, Line 7 is doing what I think is one of the most important efforts in food today\u2014bridging the gap between artificially flavored junk food and real food.<\/p>\n

The produce industry has spent decades indiscriminately breeding the taste of basic vegetables to suit the needs of industrial food supply chains. Carrots, potatoes, salad greens\u2014much of what you find in supermarkets has been selected for everything but taste. Is it any wonder that children still have trouble eating their vegetables? We have created a food system where a bag of sheets brings the joy of more taste than a carrot and it doesn’t have to be that way.<\/p>\n

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Remember the first time you tried mid-season heirloom tomatoes? I agree. It completely blew my mind about the perceived taste power of a generic product. I felt like I’d been lied to by most of the tomato industry about how good this stuff could taste. That first bite was a revelation\u2014sweet, acidic, and incredibly complex, like I’d been eating tomato brine all my life. It got me thinking: what other food have I ever accepted?<\/p>\n

And how lucky was I to find this, when so many people go through life not knowing that vegetables are not supposed to taste as delicious as the examples on the supermarket shelves? Of course, it doesn’t work for everyone to spend $8 on an heirloom tomato\u2014I get that this sounds like entitled foodie nonsense.<\/p>\n

But what if we put the same energy into making vegetables irresistible that we put into developing snacks? What impact can we have on the world in getting people to eat more vegetables and fruits by showing them the most delicious varieties of things they didn’t think could be delicious? Imagine how much more we could do to convince people to eat more real food if they understood there was a better, tastier option waiting for them.<\/p>\n

The Twilight of Universal Taste<\/strong><\/h2>\n

It’s really hard to try and imagine how much fun a critical mass of people can agree on. In our increasingly fragmented society\u2014divided by culture, class, geography, and digital echo chambers\u2014can we create flavors that almost everyone agrees are delicious? Flavor is very subjective and can be changed by situation, mood, situation, story, context, and a thousand other variables. This requires stepping outside your preferences and thinking about what pleasure means to people from different backgrounds, with different genetics, different food histories.<\/p>\n

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A spice that seems mild to someone accustomed to fresh, high-quality ingredients may taste overwhelming to someone raised on processed foods. Products designed for mass appeal often disappoint people looking for more sophisticated tastes. The challenge is to create a meal that combines these different flavor worlds without dumbing everything down to the lowest common denominator\u2014but perhaps that challenge is becoming impossible.<\/p>\n

If this is true, then the basic assumption that the Big Diet\u2014creating a common diet for the masses\u2014may be eroding. Is it a fool’s errand to try to please everyone? Maybe it’s a smart game to watch out for people we know who will love something and forget about being everything to everyone. This shift is already slowly taking place in our grocery aisles, with endless brands targeting products for specific dietary needs, cultural preferences, and lifestyle ethnicities.<\/p>\n

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But I wonder: can anyone create a company today from scratch that has a great aroma like Coca-Cola once had? Or do we live in the darkness of universal taste, where the future does not belong to the products that unite us, but to those that divide us into ever smaller, complacent nations?<\/p>\n

Doing Good Can’t Be Stopped<\/strong><\/h2>\n

We are facing major challenges in the food system: climate change, public health issues, food security. Flavor is the key that unlocks the potential of any food to solve these problems. Promising new diets aren’t asking people to sacrifice happiness for beauty\u2014they’re making healthy choices more enjoyable.<\/p>\n

Consider the important work Mette Johnsen, CEO of Spora, described in our interview. Spora is a global food research center that emerged from Copenhagen’s Alchemist restaurant, combining avant-garde gastronomy with food science. His team tackled the 80 million tons of rapeseed cake left over every year after de-oiling\u2014a protein-rich waste that looks like “rabbit feed” and tastes bitter because of compounds that inhibit nutrient absorption.<\/p>\n

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Through fermentation, they turned this industrial product into what Johnsen calls a “gold standard protein” that is as nutritionally valuable as soy. The result is a versatile meat alternative that can be formed into burger patties, used in bolognese, or mixed with the spring salads now served at Alchemist.<\/p>\n

While Alchemist itself remains a guaranteed dining experience\u2014accessible only to a select few due to cost and space\u2014operations like Spora represent something far more important: innovative sandboxes where extensive resources and world-class talent can identify patterns of fun that would eventually reach mainstream food stations. The same fermentation methods that perfect rapeseed protein for Copenhagen’s elite could one day inform products sold at McDonald’s or Walmart. These state-of-the-art laboratories serve as proof grounds for flavor success that, once refined, can be scaled and democratized.<\/p>\n

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This illustrates an important principle: without first solving the basic taste problem\u2014making something truly delicious that people will choose over and over again\u2014the enormous potential of turning large waste streams into human food would not be realized. As Johnsen puts it, they put \u201cpleasure first\u201d as an important way to make sustainable food choices.<\/p>\n

Everyone in the food industry says “it has to taste good,” but how many succeed in doing that? The gap between intention and execution is too great. Too many companies deny how their products taste compared to what is already winning in the market.<\/p>\n

Sustainable food won’t win on guilt alone\u2014they have to win in the arena of instant gratification. The most exciting food technologies are focused on unlocking new flavors that were not possible before: fermentation that creates completely new flavors from food waste, growing techniques that concentrate flavor compounds, processing that preserves the senses that are often lost in mass production.<\/p>\n

These methods recognize that taste is more than just an expression\u2014it is the fundamental force that determines which foods are organic. Products that taste better don’t just sell better, they also shape eating patterns and ultimately determine our entire food system.<\/p>\n

This story was inspired by a discussion about The Future of Flavor<\/strong> on the Tomorrow Today Show, featuring host Mike Lee and guest host Ali Bouzari (food scientist and founder of Pilot R&D), Mario Ubiali (Founder of Thymus), Ori Zohar (founder of Burlap & Barrel), and Mette Johnsen (CEO of Spora).<\/em><\/p>\n

This post was originally published in Mike Lee’s wonderfully written and informative stack. You can find the post here. You must register!<\/em><\/p>\n

And you know what? You should also subscribe to Mike’s new podcast, The Tomorrow Today Show, from the Spoon Podcast Network. You can listen to this episode about flavor below. <\/em><\/p>\n

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