MULTIMIX

According to the nutritional and health recommendations of the French National Program for Nutrition and Health (Programme National Nutrition Santé, PNNS), the development of food products combining nutritional and organoleptic qualities for the benefit of the consumers' health and well-being is of paramount importance. The reduction of salt, sugar and fat represents one of the means for the development of food with good nutritional quality. This reduction can however be associated with a loss of organoleptic quality of reformulated food. Meanwhile, hedonic properties of food represent a key factor for its palatability. Since consumers’ preferences lean towards a high liking for sweet and fat food, new means to avoid rejection of healthier food are required. Food can be regarded as a complex multimodal perceptual stimuli, involving several dimensions. The holistic perception of taste, odor and aroma constitutes the flavor, which gives its identity and typicality to a food product. It is difficult to distinguish between the taste and the aroma: what is often believed to be the "taste" of food is in reality its odor. Interestingly, due to the association of aroma and taste into a single object named flavor, when a taste–odor association exists, the odor alone may be sufficient to produce the flavor perception. For example, the taste of a sucrose solution is perceived sweeter after addition of a caramel aroma. Likewise, an odor associated to a salty taste can enhance the salty perception. In this way, flavorings can be used to counterbalance salt, sugar or fat reduction in foods. Aromas are often perceived in mixtures, which can lead to a homogeneous percept when a single odor is perceived from the mixture. The homogeneous percept is the subject of important applications in food flavoring, either to give or restore flavor typicality through the use of blending aroma mixtures, or to mask off-flavors. Nevertheless, the processes involved in the homogeneous perception of odor mixtures are still poorly understood. In this context, a fundamental study of homogeneous percept can bring essential knowledge to manage the aroma formulation, which, in turn, will result in food that meets both consumer expectations and criteria of healthy food. The objective of the MULTIMIX project is to identify the biological and molecular characteristics of odorants that induce a homogeneous percept. In this perspective, MULTIMIX proposes a strong combination of in silico, in vitro, ex-vivo and in vivo approaches. Together, these approaches will be used to improve the understanding of homogeneous perception of odor mixtures and to provide, in fine, an assemblage of models for decision-support in formulation of aroma blending. Peripheral mechanisms occurring in the nose have been proposed to play a decisive role in the processing of mixture information. The understanding of mechanisms involved in the perception of odor mixtures at the peripheral level of olfactory process is a challenging subject. In the MULTIMIX project, we will capitalize on previous studies done by several partners of the MULTIMIX consortium to explore the properties of several mixtures of odorants eliciting blending and masking. For instance, we will investigate the mixture of two odorants having strawberry and caramel odors respectively, which gives rise to the configural odor of pineapple. MULTIMIX is an ambitious project that will have a significant impact in several domains of food chemistry and olfactory perception (food science, psychophysics, computational chemistry, neurophysiology, cognitive neurosciences).