What are the 'natural flavors' in a fruit drink that contains no juice?

Question

When a fruit (flavored) beverage says it contains all natural flavors but no juice, where is the flavor coming from? Is it possible there are man-made additives being thrown in that can be technically considered "natural"?

Answer 1

Ok... I'm going to ruin your day with this. In orange juice for instance, the process of homaginization and storage kills the flavor of orange juice, so the industry has enlisted the help of the perfume industry to help them. Each orange juice company has basically a perfume of orange flavors that it uses from the peels and rinds and biproducts that it uses to try to recreate the taste of real orange juice... It's why every orange juice brand tastes slightly different even though they are all "fresh squeezed" (btw, they are technically fresh squeezed, they're just then stored :))

If you google "orange juice flavor packs" you can see what this is talking about. The flavor packs are incidentally made out of parts of the orange, so the fda has no problem with them (sadly).

http://consumerist.com/2011/07/oj-flavor-packs.html

So to directly answer your question, you can flavor something with fruit derived perfume and call it "natural flavors"

Here's a quote from the site:

Juice companies therefore hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that formulate perfumes for Dior and Calvin Klein, to engineer flavor packs to add back to the juice to make it taste fresh. Flavor packs aren't listed as an ingredient on the label because technically they are derived from orange essence and oil. Yet those in the industry will tell you that the flavor packs, whether made for reconstituted or pasteurized orange juice, resemble nothing found in nature. The packs added to juice earmarked for the North American market tend to contain high amounts of ethyl butyrate, a chemical in the fragrance of fresh squeezed orange juice that, juice companies have discovered, Americans favor.

Answer 2

Both natural and artificial flavors are "man-made", or manufactured. The difference is, essentially, in which chemicals are used in the process. For "natural" flavors, alcohol or oil extracted flavors are generally permitted, and heat or enzymes can be used to extract the flavors. For "artificial" flavors, solvents with a shorter history, created since the industrial age, and petroleum products may be involved. But either way, "flavors" are just chemicals, or mixes of chemicals. The rules that define the differences are fairly arbitrary. The same companies that make artificial flavors and fragrances make "natural" ones.

Once flavor compounds are discovered and isolated by flavor manufacturers, they can produce them using techniques considered natural or artificial. Some "natural" flavors may actually come from sources that don't match their namesakes; cherry, almond, peach, and apricot flavors are essentially made from the same source, as I recall, and different concentrations and contrasting items (including citric acid) affect your perception of the flavor. There's no guarantee that "natural" means "safer" or "healthier"; "natural" peach flavor may contain trace amounts of cyanide, for example, but "artificial" versions won't.

If something tastes juice-like but isn't "juice", chances are it has added citric acid (which is "natural", even though as an isolate, it, too is an industrial product), in addition to small quantities of flavor compounds, and sweeteners of some sort.

In home cooking, I've used citric acid to make some items taste brighter or more intense than they would otherwise, especially if I had some sort of fruit syrup that I considered too sweet for my purpose.