Flavor & Mouthfeel Teardown: Expert Written Assessment of Your Product

A flavorist's written diagnosis of what's actually wrong with your product's taste and texture — and the roadmap to fix it. $950, credited toward any project you book within 60 days.

Your reviews keep using the same words. Chalky. Grainy. The mint is too harsh. Tastes weird after. You know something's off, but "off" isn't a spec you can hand a manufacturer.

That's what this fixes. You send me the product; I evaluate it the way oral care gets evaluated inside Colgate and ADM — a structured sensory teardown across the attributes that actually drive whether someone spits it out or repurchases. Then I tell you *why* it's happening, in formulation terms, and *what to change* first.

This is the diagnosis, not the reformulation. But it's the diagnosis that makes the reformulation cheap — because you stop guessing and start fixing the right thing.

What you get:

• A written teardown (4–6 pages): your product scored across flavor impact, character, sweetness, cooling, mouthfeel and texture, aftertaste, and off-notes — benchmarked against the brands winning on taste in your category.
  
• Root-cause analysis: not just "it's chalky" but *what in the formula is making it chalky* and where the harsh mint and the off-notes are coming from.
  
• A prioritized fix roadmap: what to change, in what order, and the direction for how — masking strategy, flavor-house and materials guidance, texture levers.
  
• A 30-minute call to walk through all of it.

Who it's for: indie oral care brands — toothpaste, mouthwash, tablets, powder — with a product in market or near-final, and no flavorist in the building.

The credit: the full $950 comes off the price of any Flavor Direction or Flavor System Build project you book within 60 days. So if you move forward, the diagnosis is effectively free.

Run by Jamie Saphow — 17 years building oral care flavor and sensory systems at Colgate-Palmolive and ADM, including Colgate's Global Sensorial Toolkit.