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Comment by wackget | Hacker News Reader

OpenCola always gets passed around but for me it just represents the tip of a very frustrating iceberg.

There are tons of flavor formulations I'd love to know - not because I'm a chemist or a food scientist but just out of sheer curiosity and the desire to learn how stuff is made.

I wish people would research other flavors, e.g.:

* Bubblegum

* Tutti Fruitti

* Irn-Bru

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“Artificial flavor” and “natural flavor” is an exemption on labelling I’d like to see disappear.

Once I bought “cinnamon spread” and it didn’t have cinnamon in the ingredients. The company refused to tell me if “natural flavors” included cinnamon. (I’m sure it did because cinnamon is cheap, but c’mon).

And yeah, a lot of alcohol products get exempted from ingredient labelling for some reason. Should be treated like food is.

AFAIK real cinnamon isn't included in the umbrealla of "natural flavors" which are isolated compounds. If it contained real cinnamon it would list cinammon, or at least "spices"

I could be misremembering. Looking at what is probably the product, yes, it says “spices” and also “artificial flavour”, but no cinnamon by name:

https://www.amazon.ca/Imperial-Cinnamon-Spread-250g/dp/B00FO...

> I’m sure it did because cinnamon is cheap, but c’mon

Buddy they're substituting lead for cinnamon in applesauce to save a penny or two. Cheap doesn't matter at scale if you can find a way to go cheaper.

IrnBru is made from girders: https://youtu.be/SD3LippIN40?si=f7Bkqn9cmUNKD3PW

They replaced the sugar with aspartame due to UK sugar tax and what made IrnBru is gone.

I miss Dr Pepper too, with aspartame or that other chemic it's just not the same.

Ok so recipe:

  Girders
  Aspartame (or sugar for orig flavour)
  Water(?)

I feel like we are getting somewhere

Has to be Scottish Water. Vastly superior to any other water in the UK.

Moving to Buckfast, then?

There's a great recent Thought Emporium video where he synthesizes chicken noodle soup from pure chemicals:

https://youtu.be/sR8M4zARBXY?si=CFFmCb26yBY1YUlB

Personally I'd like to know the formulas for certain foods because lately there have been a lot of ingredient and process changes that have made the foods and drinks taste so much worse, and not just in processed foods. There's the overreliance on high fructose corn syrup, the switch from canola to much worse and more environmentally destructive palm oil, the rise of using acid concentrates instead of actual fruit juice, and so on. If it's not the ingredient changes, it's market consolidation that has killed the better product so the bigger one can survive, such as Cheez-Its killing Cheese Nips. If I knew the old recipes I'd make these things myself.

I once worked on a project for a company that made food flavoring products. I helped build their digital cookbook.

They had different recipes for the same flavor depending on the usage. For example, ranch chip powder and ranch dip would have different ingredients and cooking instructions.

Also that had so many different ways just to make vanilla flavoring depending on the customer's needs. So two soda makers might use different artificial vanilla flavorings.

Preface, flavoring and perfumery are very nearly the same practice. You can view the back catalog of the trade rag Perfumer and Flavorist, which will include formulae and articles of ingredients or industry developments. Of course there are books on the topic. The Good Scent Company is a free online database of aromachemicals. Further, you can buy these ingredients from places like Perfumer's Apprentice, if you wanted to get to know some of them.

For natural ingredients, you can usually just google the name of it plus "gcms" and get a list of known compounds in it with percentages.

Not an easy profession or hobby to get into, though.

I naively thought that mass spectrometry would make it easy to know what's in a secret formula.

I wonder why that's not the case.

I just want true rootbeer again... Too bad the main ingredient is prohibited from being used

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