Could You Actually Taste A Product Before Buying It Online?

Authored by Karla Rossouw 

Virtual reality has advanced to a point where we can upload images of ourselves and see how clothing or makeup products would fit us. Additionally, medical students can now practice complex surgeries in a simulated environment and gaming enthusiasts can be immersed in fictional worlds from the comfort of a lounge. But while engineers and developers have mastered getting our senses involved in digital experiences, a specific sense has been left behind: taste.

Well, that was the case up until researchers at Ohio State University developed e-Taste. e-Tasting is a system that was created with the purpose of capturing taste information and recreating those sensations remotely, which is once again moving the shopping experience to the next level.

How Does Digital Tasting Work?

In case this thought might have crossed your mind, rest assured that this tech doesn’t require you to lick your smartphone or computer screen in an attempt to taste a food item. Instead, the process involves wearable hardware that sits near or inside your mouth. The e-Taste system uses special sensors to analyse a physical food or drink in the real world. These sensors are capable of recognising molecules like glucose and glutamate, which are responsible for the five basic tastes of sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami.

Once the device captures this chemical data, it proceeds to turn it into an electrical signal and sends it wirelessly to the user’s wearable machine. To recreate the flavour, the user’s device relies on an actuator, which is a component that moves or controls a mechanism. It uses a small electromagnetic pump to vibrate and push a liquid chemical solution through a special gel layer and straight onto a person’s tongue.

By adjusting how long the solution touches the gel, the system can change the strength and intensity of the flavour. While testing this system, a researcher placed a sensor into a glass of lemonade in California and sent the digital instructions to a colleague in Ohio. The colleague was then able to taste the replicated flavour from their own connected machine.

Where Could Digital Tasting Be Useful?

With this technology, food and beverage startups could actually formulate new flavours and allow consumers across the world to sample and try them out instantly. Furthermore, remote demonstrations in the hospitality industry could let tourists taste a local dish digitally before booking a restaurant reservation or a holiday package.

But it doesn’t stop there, as there are similar health tech applications as well. For instance, for people dealing with traumatic brain injuries or those suffering from long COVID symptoms, regaining a lost sense of taste can be a slow process. A system that simulates flavours could become a valuable tool in helping these patients gradually reintroduce taste sensations.

The Current Limitations

In human trials, the e-Taste device achieved 70% accuracy in a sourness-intensity test that involved just 10 trained volunteers. In a separate test involving six trained volunteers, participants were able to correctly identify five predefined food representations 86.7% of the time. However, these are small, specific experiments, and they aren’t proof that the system can flawlessly recreate any food you want to buy online.

On the other hand, taste is a highly subjective experience and how we perceive a meal is largely influenced by our sense of smell, visual cues and even personal memories. A chemical paste on your tongue might carry the right amount of salt and umami, but it lacks the satisfying crunch or the rich aroma of the real products. For this reason, engineers are looking to miniaturise the equipment and find ways to better combine chemical compounds to make the simulation feel more authentic.

Turning Food Orders Into Online Taste Tests

Even though this technology exists, we will most likely not be tasting digital meals by next year. Developers still need to focus on how these devices can be transformed into everyday consumer hardware. No online shopper wants to deal with complex chemical cartridges or wear an uncomfortable headset just to see whether they’d like a new brand of lemonade. Instead, these interfaces need to become as effortless and accessible as putting on a pair of headphones.

On top of that, tech companies still have to prove that these chemical simulations can truly replicate the complex characteristics of real food, rather than just copying basic sweet or sour flavours. Additionally, they need to address where the tech still falls short, like missing that satisfying crunch of a biscuit or the aroma of a hot coffee. Improving on these aspects is vital to ensure that consumers would be interested in using such a system in the first place.