Taste Retargeting via Chemical Taste Modulators

Prior research has explored modifying taste through electrical stimulation. While promising, such interfaces often only elicit taste changes while in contact with the user's tongue (e.g., cutlery with electrodes), making them incompatible with eating and swallowing real foods. Moreover, most interfaces cannot selectively alter basic tastes, but only the entire flavor profile (e.g., cannot selectively alter bitterness). To tackle this, we propose taste retargeting, a method of altering taste perception by delivering chemical modulators to the mouth before eating. These modulators temporarily change the response of taste receptors to foods, selectively suppressing or altering basic tastes. Our first study identified six accessible taste modulators that suppress salty, umami, sweet, or bitter and transform sour into sweet. Using these findings, we demonstrated an interactive application of this technique with the example of virtual reality, which we validated in our second study. We found that taste retargeting reduced the flavor mismatch between a food prop and other virtual foods.