For the average home cook, creating a new recipe can be a fun, simple experiment — they may pull from their list of go-to ingredients and spices to create different combinations of flavors. Sometimes it’s works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
For product developers in the food and flavor industry, it’s a lot more complicated. Let’s say they’re tasked with developing a seasoning for a specific dish, such as a rice bowl. They’ll have to meet a variety of requirements related to factors like the price range, ingredients used, sustainability or healthiness. Working within those constraints, the developer picks a “base formula” to start with — they’ll usually have around 5,000 or 10,000 base formulas to choose from. After they’ve added to the base formula, they’ll send their new recipes out for testing.