Dutch-based flavour and fragrance company Quest International has said it has helped develop the world’s first ‘artificial throat’, an instrument designed to speed up flavour development and allow the science of flavour release after the human swallowing process to be better understood.

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Quest said the new technology would benefit food and drinks manufacturers and flavour developers by modelling and predicting volatile release and thus delivering more valuable information and allowing faster turnaround to market for new product concepts.


“Before we began the project, not much was known about the link between swallowing food or drinks and the first breath that takes the flavour into the nasal cavity,” said Jack Burger, senior scientist at Quest International and project leader for the artificial throat development.


“We realised that the key to understanding this would be to investigate in detail the connection between the act of swallowing and the effects taking place in the nose: to look at them in isolation would be to ignore a vital part of the sensory experience,” Burger added.


A Quest team with experts in the field of sensory, flavours, beverages and mass spectrometry joined up with a team from NIZO food research. The €2.5m (US$3.2m) project is expected to culminate in a full patent by the end of 2004.

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The artificial throat can only test flavour release – it cannot test flavour perception, which can only be performed by humans. For example, although the flavour concentration in the nasal cavity may be exactly the same for normal fat yoghurt as it is for zero fat yoghurt, the taste perception is drastically changed when the flavour is combined with other ingredients. Neither can the artificial throat define if something is sweet, sour or bitter, Quest said.