Flavors bring the fun, especially when they’re not hiding anything. Here’s what’s inside ours — and what’s not!
Step 1:
Start with non-GMO, vegan ingredients.
Supernatural flavors begin as non-GMO, vegan ingredients sourced from the earth — like fruits, vegetables, herbs, and spices. Nothing synthetic or from animals, ever.
In general, natural flavors can have their start as anything that meets their legal definition: A substance derived from plant or animal material, such as a spice, fruit, vegetable, meat, or dairy product, whose significant purpose is for flavor.
The legal definition leaves some wiggle room around bio-engineering, plus we like to keep it vegan. So we developed our own, stricter criteria to guide our sourcing: Nothing genetically modified, synthetic, or animal-derived.
Step 2:
Extract the flavors, naturally.
Next up, extracting the natural compounds. For example, a single strawberry has over 350 individual flavor molecules, and they each influence how it smells and tastes (Mother Nature is awesome). Using extraction, scientists can isolate each molecule. There are lots of methods for extraction, but we stick to the natural ones, using pure alcohol, filtration and distillation.
All 350+ natural flavor molecules inside a strawberry can be extracted right from the strawberry. They can also be recreated in a lab, making bio-identical flavor molecules. The process for isolating each flavor compound can vary, and again, some utilize synthetics. So our guidelines for extraction avoid anything synthetic, and require original sources.
Step 3:
Create the perfect flavor.
Now, meet the flavorists. Arguably one of the world’s coolest jobs, flavorists blend the individual compounds to recreate a juicy strawberry — or create something entirely new. Like a DJ, they remix nature’s original flavors, with no limit to their imagination.
That’s how we create otherworldly flavors like Gummy Bear, Vanilla Dream Machine, and Cotton Candy Clouds, but still keep it grounded. ‘Cause Gummy Bears still don’t grow on trees - sigh.