Bitter maskers or flavors to compliment?

Product Development
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Hi All,

I’m working with some bitter herbal powder (think reishi mushroom) and am having a hard time coming up with how to mask it.
I’ve tried a plethora of bitter maskers and they haven’t done much. When I add a lot of it, the masker flavor is coming up making the whole powder unpalatable.
If anyone has previous experience, I’d love to hear your insight!

My experience so far: the only “masker” that seems to work is mint - the menthol almost shocks the taste buds enough to distract it from the bitterness. Marketing is not too fond of mint powder unfortunately:/
I’m also working with flavors to hopefully compliment the bitterness (flavors that are inherently bitter like coffee, lime, etc), but the flavors aren’t coming out as much as I’d hope.

Thank you in advance!

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Cyclodextrins can bind with bitterness components…have a look at it…

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I had a similar issue with bitterness when working on a beverage containing BCAAs. The masker i used did reduce the bitterness however i still had to make the beverage grapefruit flavoured so that the remaining bitter flavour could be attributed to the fruit.

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You should always try below flavour options when you are trying to mask bitterness

  • Grapefruit, liquorice, aniseed, cherry, chocolate, coffee, tutti-frutti, berries