Masking Bitter Taste by Molecules

Combating bitter taste in food, pharmaceuticals, and beverages remains a huge challenge. In the past, bitterness reduction was focused on pharmaceuticals and drugs; however, more recently, the most intense research is performed on the reduction of bitter or astringent taste in functional food or beverage applications. These foods and beverages possess inherent off-tastes due to fortification with healthy but poor-tasting actives. During the last 10 years, tremendous progress in the elucidation of bitter taste reception and transduction on the cellular level was made and many new molecules and compounds to reduce bitter off-tastes were reported. The following review will be focused on the advances, in the area of bitter-masking molecules, during the last 10 years. It will not cover other debittering strategies such as process optimization or biotransformations to reduce the amount of bitter ingredients, encapsulation, and other physical formulation technologies. The review will close with a short comparative study of various bitter maskers and some suggestions for flavor development of poor-tasting ingredients.