You might think that something like flavoring is pretty straightforward. "Flavor” just means "taste” after all, right? How complicated could it be? Well, in fact, there may be far more to the innocuous "natural flavor” or "artificial flavor” ingredients list items than meets the eye. It’s important to know the difference between a food company using pure fruit to add fresh, delicious and nutritious flavor to their fruit juice or fruit smoothies and one using "natural flavor” to trick your taste buds into thinking they’re experiencing something other than what they are.

 

Playing With Words

 

You might think that if an apple juice contains what’s called "natural flavors”, it must have come from actual apples, right? Well, not so fast. Technically in many jurisdictions, in order to be labelled as "natural flavor”, an additive simply has to appear anywhere in nature. For instance, if a corporate chemist discovers that a certain type of South American fungus that grows on low-lying shrubs can be prepared in a way that makes it taste a little like strawberries, that fungus can form the basis for an additive to strawberry ice cream and will be counted as "natural flavor”. If it’s not fully man-made in a lab somewhere, it counts as ‘natural’. And so a beverage that was labeled as "apple flavor" or "’flavored with” could contain only sugar, water, citric acid and caramel color with no apple juice at all. That might be the case whether or not the product was flavored naturally or artificially. That is different than a beverage or smoothie mix that was labeled as "100% apple juice” that contains the actual fruit juice.

 

Why fix what’s not broken?

 

Some companies, on the other hand, recognize that nature is actually really good at what it does, and that in pure, fresh fruit, it has produced an efficient, delicious, colorful and incredibly healthy product. When you hold an apple, orange or mango in your hand, you’ve got all the fresh fruit flavor you could possibly want. Add to that the incredible, almost unbelievable variety of fruits that nature produces, and the result is that no matter who you are, or what your personal tastes are like, there’s a fruit out there with your name on it. Companies like Smartfruit, for example, recognize how great fruit is all on its own, and have made the decision to base their products on not messing with a good thing. If fruit is already both delicious and nutritious, then the best starting point for anything they do is pure blended fruit, with no unnecessary additives, even if those additives technically allow it to be called "natural”. By adding real blended fruit to just about anything, you infuse it with the freshness and healthy goodness of fruit, while at the same time giving it the pure fruit flavor you want.

 

Ultimately, the decision of what you buy and eat and drink comes down to you. With a little insight into how food labeling laws work in your country, and by paying attention to those labels, you can get a better idea of what exactly is in that off the counter fruit smoothie you’re looking at. Fruit flavors are okay to consume so long that they come from the fruit itself (also known as fruit essence as appose to synthetic fruit flavorings) and so long that they are added to a beverage, juice, or smoothie mix that is made from 100% fruit.