Designer Salt

"We have to think of the whole eating experience — not just the physical product, but what’s actually happening when the consumer eats the product," says PepsiCo’s Dr. Greg Yep in a Wall Street Journal article by Betsy McKay (3/22/10). Greg joined PepsiCo from Givaudan, the Swiss flavor company, last year. It’s his special challenge to figure out a way to reduce the salt in potato chips by 25 percent, but without altering "the whole eating experience."

This is particularly tricky because potato chips have just three ingredients — potatoes, oil and salt. "Normally, only about 20 percent of the salt on a chip actually dissolves on the tongue before the chip is chewed and swallowed, and the remaining 80 percent is swallowed without contributing to the taste," according to PepsiCo research. So, the Pepsi challenge is to deliver "an initial spike of saltiness, then a body of flavor and lingering sensation."

This can’t be accomplished simply by grinding the salt into "smaller particles" which give a quick, but too fleeting, sense of saltiness. Instead, Greg and his team are playing with "different shapes of salt crystals to try to find one that would dissolve more efficiently on the tongue." They think they may have a winner, "a slightly powdery ingredient" that small groups of consumers in the U.S. and U.K. couldn’t distinguish from regular salt. PepsiCo plans further testing, and Greg hopes his "designer salt" might be on the market within about two years.