“Natural flavors” can be confusing. So how do we make otherworldly tastes and smells, but still keep it grounded? Warning: It’s about to get geeky.

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.”

That definition leaves some wiggle room around bio-engineering (aka, GMOs). And if you’re vegan, this “animal material” stuff is a no-go. So we created custom criteria for the sources of our flavors: No animal anything. Thumbs up on plant material, but nothing bio-engineered, please!

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.

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. Our flavors do not contain the lab-made molecules — we use the 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. Finally, they dilute the flavors in ethyl alcohol (aka, grain alcohol), just like any flavor or extract.

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.

After remixing, natural flavors are very concentrated. Diluting them keeps them fresh, and easier to use. We chose to dilute ours in non-gmo grain alcohol, the same stuff that most vanilla extracts use. Some of our flavors will also contain organic glycerin, to keep everything emulsified.

Fun fact: Like perfumes, the exact flavor compounds inside each remix are a secret, which protects them from being copied. That’s another reason why it’s so important to set good ground rules around how flavors are made (and why ingredient labels just say, “natural flavor”)!