We are pleased to announce that our 7th Annual Flavors of Chemistry will be occurring in-person at UC Davis with a live-stream on Saturday, September 25th. The presentation will be from 2:30–4 PM, with a networking social starting at 2 PM. The event will feature Dr. Sean LaFond talking about flavor creation.
Complex Flavor Creation: Eliciting Emotion with Chemicals
The food we eat, the beverages we drink, and the environment we live in are filled with a vast array of volatile chemical compounds. Despite the chemical complexity in the world around us, we are capable of perceiving complex mixtures as single percepts: a strawberry tastes like strawberry; an egg tastes like an egg; a bourbon whiskey tastes like bourbon whiskey. Join me for a discussion about the psychophysical underpinnings of complex flavor perception and how to leverage them to build flavors from their molecular components.
Dr. Sean LaFond is the Director of Flavor for Verofolia, located in Healdsburg, CA, as well as a scientific consultant for Edible Odyssey in Davis, CA. During the past fifteen years, Dr. LaFond has worked on numerous projects in the food industry and academia. His research interests encompass the creation of complex flavors and the sensory methods to evaluate them. He holds a MS in Food Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he studied lipid oxidation in frying oils, and a PhD in Food Science from the University of California at Davis where he studied the sensory perception of flavor blending.
