Welch's Puts the Taste of Grape Juice in People Magazine

Don't be alarmed if your commute neighbor starts licking his People magazine on your next ride. He's just getting a taste of Welch's grape juice; or at least that's what I hope he's doing.

Developed by First Flavor, a lickable, “Peel 'n Taste” ad for Welch's features a sample of juice behind a metal foil (pictured, right). You won't stain your tie when sampling since the tasty bit actually uses the same type of film tech as breath strips that dissolve on the tongue.

Matching a flavor doesn’t mean matching the ingredients. “It’s the human perception of the flavor,” President and CEO Jay Minkoff explains. To begin the matching process, the flavor house that First
Flavor works with—David, Michael & Co. in Philadelphia—assembles an expert panel, “individuals with a high degree of taste acuity,” Minkoff says. These super-tasters work with chemists to recreate the flavor as they perceive it. Flavor houses don't start from scratch; the big flavor houses have somewhere between 25 and 50 thousand stock flavors that can be mixed and matched, but Minkoff says, sometimes a new artificial flavor has to be invented...

...The film bases are made of hydrocolloids—a molecule that holds water, but also dissolves in the presence of water. They are often used as thickening agents; Jello gelatin is a hydrocolloid. Cellulose is also a key ingredient of the film. “We just discovered a type of cellulose that is four times more soluble than the pullulan that the
Listerine breath strips use,” Minkoff says, adding that this new
(undisclosed) base would be ideal for creating quick bursts of flavor...

...“Savory flavors are very difficult.” The meatiness was not hard for the flavor house to replicate, but getting the flavor to taste good on a dissolvable strip was another matter. “A potato chip tends to have a burnt, savory and salty type of a base and then add the meat to it—it might be nice with a crunchy potato base, but when you actually put it on a piece of edible film, you kind of wanted to spit it out.” [via Science Friday]

The company's first attempt to get readers to stop reading and start licking was in the September issue of Rolling Stone, when First Flavor embedded rum mojito-flavoured bits of paper into the print run, to advertise the CBS show Cane. That issue was very popular with high school kids. First Flavor has since worked with Arm & Hammer, who had been having problems getting people to try out a new toothpaste flavor, and now Welch's.

The idea to create tasty ads came after Founder and EVP Adnan Aziz watched the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. "There is a scene where Willie Wonka shows the kids some flavoured wallpaper," President and CEO Jay Minkoff told The Guardian. "Adnan has been working on that ever since."

I'm going to pick up the latest People just to get a sampling of this yummy innovation. I'll report back on whether or not I also bought a Welch's with my purchase.

Photo Courtesy: Jay Minkoff/First Flavor Inc.