"Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down; in a most delightful way." We all recognize these lines taken from the lyrics of the famous musical Mary Poppins that explain the most straightforward way of taste masking—just add sugar.
Market studies show that ingestible cosmetic ingredients like collagen, hyaluronic acids, ceramides, and MSM that taste good provide a competitive advantage for beauty brands. Palatability is crucial for consumer acceptance, but undesirable taste is one of several fundamental formulation challenges when creating nutricosmetic products. Many cosmeceutical products on the market have unpleasant, bitter-tasting components, so formulations with a pleasing taste and mouthfeel would be preferred over a competitor's product and translate into better acceptance and therapeutic value for the consumer, as well as revenue and repeat purchase for the beauty or wellness brand. The Tosla R&D team has been laser focused on improving palatability in nutricosmetics, developing a revolutionary masking technology that has raised the bar on performance and acceptability.
There is no single ingredient capable of fixing all flavor issues. The solution to masking undesirable flavor notes in ingestible cosmetics systems relies on the right combination of different agents. Masking agents work in different ways depending upon what they are hiding and the nutraceutical application. Masking tastes is nothing new; it’s been embedded in our culture. For instance, sugar has been used to mask bitterness or sourness for centuries. Because masking agents are often a blend of ingredients, how they work can be explained by understanding some of the taste phenomena they may be involved in. Bitterness, vitamin and mineral flavor, or metallic flavor in a nutricosmetic product must be addressed with a masking technique that gives the end product an appealing taste.
The perceived flavor of beauty supplements results from the combined perception of aroma, taste, and mouthfeel resulting from the stimulation of receptors in the oral and nasal cavities. Unfortunately, many nutraceutical ingredients are perceived as bitter, leading to decreased acceptability. Sweetness is the simplest method of masking taste, especially in food supplement formulations. But this approach is not very successful for clinically proven beauty ingredients linked to wellness, especially for consumers who are hyper aware of their sugar intake. The consumers want to know the quality and nutritional value of these beauty ingestible. That is why Tosla is using Velious Masking Technology which improves the consumer's experience without influencing a healthy diet.
To develop Velious, our scientists first needed to understand the interactions in a nutricosmetics matrix and interactions occurring in the mouth. From a perceptual point of view, taste-masking cosmeceuticals functions at two different levels: in-mouth (peripheral interactions) or at the brain level (central cognitive interactions). Our R&D team based Velious' taste-masking technique on these two phenomena.
Sensory analysis, conducted by independent researchers, confirmed the superior palatability of the product using our Velious masking technology over those products without it. The study covered four formulations containing high-concentrated collagen and MSM formulations. We tried to mask the unpleasant taste of ingestible cosmetic ingredients with flavors, sweeteners, and sugar in different combinations with three of the formulations, while Velious masking technology was used for the fourth. Product with Velious masking technology was chosen as more palatable in all pairwise comparisons with other products by most panelists, and the statistical significance of those results was confirmed using R‐index analysis. When asked about the product with Velious masking technology, the panelists reported on better, fresher aroma, pleasant taste, and perfectly balanced, silky texture.
Velious masking technique tackles most of the flavoring problems combined with a blend of different nutricosmetics issues. As beauty product developers and marketers seek the next hero cosmeceutical ingredient, the challenge for Tosla technologists can seem intimidating. Fortunately, Velious masking technology is evolving and improving, helping to prevent newly developed product disintegration, spoilage, or taste bitterness, imparting a beneficial beauty effect.
Tosla leverages its knowledge in the nutricosmetics space and innovation related to collagen to create turnkey product solutions to help beauty and wellness brands capture the growth in the collagen beverage market, projected to grow at a CAGR of 9.8% and anticipated to reach $255.4 million by 2032.
