THE HIDDEN ARCHITECTS OF INDIA'S FOOD BOOM

Meet the brains behind every other granola bar, cold brew, and protein snack in the market

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The table looks deceptively ordinary. There are four bowls of onion bajjis (onion fritters), with their crisp golden edges curled and the scent of fried batter hanging in the air.

To the untrained eye, they look identical. But inside flavour, fragrance and aroma consultancy Confluence Valley's five-acre office in Hosur, a Tamil Nadu town about 50 km from Bengaluru, these fritters are part of a controlled experiment. One batch is plain, another carries an engineered 'fat aroma' mixed into the batter, a third has the aroma infused in the oil, and the fourth has it both in the oil and the batter.

What looks like a simple snack is, in fact, science at work.

Fat aroma, as managing director Baskaran Parameswaran explains, is the invisible hand behind flavour-the notes of butteriness, caramel, or meatiness that fats bring to food. His team is developing a new recipe for a popular quick service restaurant chain in South India, re-engineering its onion bajjis to fry in half the time, from 10 minutes to just five, without compromising on taste, texture, or smell. For the restaurant, that means faster service, lower costs, and, Baskaran insists, a healthier snack.

"It's all chemistry," he says. "When you notice a difference in taste, you need to know which aromatic component is responsible. Is it caramelic? Fatty? Sweet? We analyse, extract, and recreate it in the lab." Depending on the client's need, fat aroma can be made into liquid for beverages, powders for fried foods, or even gels and capsules.

Over the next three hours, the experiments continue: flavoured buttermilks, a tea sample designed to mimic a rival brand's taste, and a fat aroma-induced murukku.

Confluence Valley is among a clutch of consultancies, including Thinking Forks and Prowess Buzz, that work with large companies and young startups alike, helping them translate ideas into products that consumers recognize and crave.