Flavorists are recreating smoke to save Europe’s snacks

Presunto de Vinhais, a cured ham from Portugal, is produced exclusively from pigs of the Bísaro breed, raised in the city of Bragança. After marinating for 24 h, the meat is massaged, salted, and hung to dry. Later, the pork is coated with paprika, smeared with locally produced olive oil, and smoked over a low fire of dried oak or chestnut wood.

Ruffles-brand presunto-flavored potato chips, a popular variety in Portugal and Spain, aim to deliver the celebrated taste of the Portuguese ham in a bag that sells for $3.

To transport consumers’ taste buds to the hills of northern Portugal, Ruffles once used smoke flavoring, ingredients made by condensing the products of wood pyrolysis into a liquid that can be easily incorporated into processed foods.

But in 2024, the European Union (EU) announced that it wouldn’t renew approvals for all eight of the region’s approved smoke flavorings, or condensates, because they contain the potentially genotoxic chemicals furan-2(5H)-one, catechol, styrene, and benzofuran. Food companies rushed to remove the ingredients before a July 2026 deadline for most foods. They will be phased out for meats, fish, and cheeses in 2029.

Smoke condensates contain an enormous number of flavor and odor molecules, and recreating this mosaic proved to be a major challenge, says Luis Almeida, a flavorist at International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) who works on the company’s portfolio of smoke flavoring alternatives.

“Smoke comes in layers. That’s the problem: the complexity. You need to tackle all the layers of smoke,” Almeida says. “It’s not just a one-to-one replacement.”

Smoke flavoring has disappeared from the list of ingredients on a bag of Ruffles presunto potato chips. In its place are ingredients like “flavoring” and “smoked salt.”

The chips still release an intense bacon smell when a bag is first opened. And with a little help from the imagination, they conjure the smooth fattiness of a piece of presunto. But some consumers in Portugal have complained about the reformulation, lamenting that they haven’t found a good batch since the change.

The initial attempts to recreate smoke may not be perfect, says Trevor Groome, a flavor technology consultant. But he says companies will continue to develop products that get closer to the mark while avoiding the potentially harmful chemicals that prompted the EU to ban smoke condensates.

“Regulation change sometimes can seem like a burden, but it’s often also the instigator for innovation,” Groome says. “You’re able to try something new, think about it in a different way.”

Flavorists get creative to replicate smoke’s complexity

In the years leading up to the phaseout of smoke flavorings, food and flavor companies started the process of creating alternatives by identifying the most crucial flavor molecules found in smoke.

At IFF, researchers visited facilities that produce smoke concentrates to understand the pyrolysis process and analyzed smoke condensates with gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, headspace analysis, and volatile analysis.

Almeida’s team had to develop its own vocabulary to describe the taste and smell of the chemicals it identified so that IFF’s flavorists could talk with customers using the same language. “The barbecue smoke that you have in your mind is different from the one that I have in my mind,” Almeida says.

Some of the molecules that chemists isolated are available already as food-grade products. Guaiacol, for example, is a phenol that can taste like vanilla or bacon. Syringol, or 2,6-dimethoxyphenol, is another important phenol found in wood smoke that contributes to smoky smells. Both are commercially available to flavor makers.

But in other cases, smoke components are not sold as food-grade ingredients or may not be an option because of health concerns. For example, furan-2(5H)-one is a component of wood smoke that can contribute a buttery taste, but it’s one of the potentially genotoxic chemicals flagged by EU regulators.

In these instances, flavorists must search their compound libraries to find alternatives that might provide a similar note. To do that, Almeida fires up the gas chromatography olfactometer, which entails sticking his nose into a device to sniff molecules isolated from smoke. He then matches the smell with obtainable ingredients.

To help fill in the gap left by furan-2(5H)-one, Almeida might turn to something like a coffee extract, which has a mixture of similar structures and flavors. But another flavorist might opt for a different route to the same taste.

“That’s where the creativity comes in,” says Phillippa Holford, the technical director for flavors in Europe at Sensient Technologies, another firm working on alternatives to smoke condensates. “It’s rebuilding that profile . . . level by level.”

For Sensient scientists, the hardest flavor to replicate was burnt wood, Holford says. After combing through catalogs of ingredients without finding the right fit, her team eventually developed its own method of pulling the burnt flavor from an existing botanical ingredient.

Groome says combining isolated smoke molecules with a botanical is a good way to recover the depth that smoke condensates offered. “You can’t just use guaiacol and syringol and expect it to be akin to what you’re replacing,” he says. “You’re taking something out that is inherently complex.”

Finding molecules that can replace missing notes is only the first step. Flavorists also must ensure that the compounds still have the desired effect once they’re incorporated into the final product. The taste of an individual ingredient might seem right on its own but shift when combined with other compounds. Or Almeida says a promising smoke replacement might alter the perception of salt, acidity, or sugar in a final product, forcing his team to go back to the drawing board.

The difficulty of balancing all the characteristics of a heterogeneous product like smoke condensate can be dizzying, says Michael Zviely, a flavor industry consultant. “Smoke is not a single note,” he says. “It has top notes. It has a body and the lingering aftertaste.”

In 2022 Zviely cofounded Mamay Technologies to speed up the process of identifying potential flavor molecules and understanding how they interact with other ingredients. Pulling from peer-reviewed literature and other public sources, the company has built a database with thousands of food-grade ingredients and the odors and tastes they contribute.

Digitizing and centralizing this information will help flavorists compare, say, a product’s original recipe with potential reformulations to see what flavors are missing and prioritize the most promising options for real-world testing, Zviely says. “This can reduce trial and error.”

Indeed, Almeida says the first smoke-condensate replacements that IFF developed several years ago weren’t exact matches, but they are improving with each iteration. “Smoke is an evolving project,” he says. “We need to get even closer.”

Companies hope natural flavorings will ‘future proof’  their products

In addition to matching the original flavors, food companies want to make sure their new smoke recipes will stand up to future regulations and changes in consumer preferences.

In Europe, smoke condensates, nonsmoke flavorings, and smoked products are each regulated separately. Smoked ingredients—created by exposing bases such as salt, paprika, and dextrose to smoke—are still permitted, since smoking is a culturally important processing technique. And many purified aromatic molecules found in wood smoke are allowed as flavorings.

Smoked ingredients offer something of a regulatory loophole for firms trying to replicate the complexity of smoke condensates. Smoked salt is one of the ingredients in the reformulated Ruffles presunto potato chips.

But Holford warns that it’s hard to use smoked ingredients to match the taste of a specific smoke condensate because both products are variable. Consumers will notice a change in the flavor of their favorite products if food companies make that switch, Holford says. “It will be massively different.”

Moreover, smoked ingredients aren’t monitored for genotoxic compounds, so it’s unclear how much they might contain. Smoke condensates were developed, in part, to reduce consumers’ exposure to dangerous chemicals generated during conventional smoking. Paradoxically, Groome warns, the phaseout of condensates may push some companies to use smoked ingredients as an initial fix, with no improvement in the safety profile.

In the long run, though, tighter regulations on smoke flavorings should encourage firms to develop new products that are even safer. “A lot of companies, they’re already creating solutions for the future,” Groome says.

One of those firms is Besmoke. Using technology developed at the University of Reading, the start-up passes smoke through a zeolite filter to remove up to 90% of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a class of carcinogenic chemicals generated during the smoking process. The filtered smoke is then run over a basic product like salt or oil to create a smoky food ingredient.

Companies could also ask the EU to approve a new smoke condensate that doesn’t contain the chemicals regulators are worried about. But there’s not much momentum for that route, says Rachel Sérafin, a global business manager for smoke ingredients at the Azelis Group, a food ingredient supplier. It’s much easier to build a flavor from ingredients that are already approved.

It could take 5 years and a significant investment to get a new smoke flavoring approved in Europe, according to Sérafin. “This is not where the industry, globally, is going,” she says.

Even before the EU decided to phase out smoke flavorings, food companies were moving toward natural flavorings because that’s what consumers are demanding, Holford says. Other regulators are also looking closely at smoke flavoring. In August, Jordan’s Food and Drug Administration mirrored Europe’s restrictions on smoke flavorings.

Using only natural flavors limits the range of molecules that flavorists can choose and makes some ingredients more expensive. But Holford argues that the strategy ensures that any product will be compliant going forward and align with consumers’ interests. “It future proofs it,” she says.

The next step of the smoke flavoring phaseout may be the most difficult. In 2029 the products will no longer be allowed for flavored meats, cheeses, and fish. Natural smoking will still be allowed for those foods.

The taste of smoke is at the core of these products, and consumers will likely be even more exacting in their assessment of alternatives, says Lene Waldenstrøm, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who has studied consumer perception of smoke flavor.

Waldenstrøm has found that consumers of smoked salmon are already skeptical of smoke flavorings because they want to imagine that their fish is smoked over a fire in a small cottage. “They think it’s not traditional enough,” she says. Switching to a smokeless alternative risks moving even further away from those preferences.

Flavorists know that smoke has a cultural meaning that affects how people perceive it. While developing IFF’s smoke-condensate replacements, Almeida worked with chefs who cooked him meals and smoked food with various types of wood to help him better understand what smoke means around the world.

If flavor firms and food producers can speak the same language, they can replicate those flavors and their meaning, Almeida says. “If I’m putting this molecule in, there is a meaning. If someone is using smoking in their application, there is a meaning.”

Matt Blois is a food, ag, and cleantech reporter at C&EN.