Taste Fingerprint: The Future of Personalised Flavours & Sensory Identity
- Mar 14
- 3 min read
You walk into a sleek, dimly lit restaurant, the kind where the sommelier usually hands you an extensive wine list filled with unfamiliar names and overwhelming choices. But tonight is different.
Instead, you take out your phone and pull up your Taste Profile—a beautifully visualised map of your personal flavour map. You show it to the sommelier, the arcs and spectrums revealing your Taste Type at a glance.
“Ah, bold and structured with a touch of acidity,” they say with a knowing smile. “I have just the wine for you.” Moments later, a glass of aged Barolo appears before you—its velvety tannins and dark fruit notes perfectly aligned with your profile. Across the table, your dining companion, whose profile favours fresh and bright flavours, is poured a crisp, citrusy Albariño.
But the magic doesn’t stop there. The sommelier shares your Taste Profile with the chef, who makes subtle yet precise adjustments to your dish—browning the steak a bit more to match your preference fro a structured texture and mature tonality, while adding a touch of citrus to brighten it up.
No guesswork. No generic recommendations. Just a taste experience that feels effortless, precise, and entirely yours.
Our taste is a reflection of our life experiences—a sensory imprint shaped by moments, memories, and emotions. Think about the warm, buttery scent of grandma’s cookies fresh out of the oven; The tang of a childhood favourite candy; The smoky spice of a dish that takes you back to a late-night street food stall in a city you once loved.
Every flavour is tied to a personal experience that shapes who we are. It connects our past and present, grounding us in the physical world through taste.
The real challenge is digitising something as abstract and deeply personal as taste.
Solving issues like food waste and dietary well-being starts with understanding what people like. Yet, chefs, food & beverage producers don’t know our taste preferences—and often, we don’t know how to fully describe it ourselves too!
So how to visualise taste in a way that feels natural, intuitive, and personal. How to turn something as sensory and emotional as flavour into something can be seen, shared, and used as a communication tool?
I’ve been obsessed with this question since losing my sense of taste & smell for five months during COVID (Luckily recovered), I realised just how much taste shapes our connection to the surroundings and spent countless hours trying to crack the code—one failed attempt after another—until I landed on a simple, yet powerful truth: the best way to digitise taste is to ask the person experiencing it and let them own it.
Knowing what we like—and being able to say it—makes a huge difference. It helps us waste less food, eat better, and actually enjoy what our food choices.
And it’s not just about us. Food brands struggled with this too. Different places have different collective taste preference, and what’s “just right” for one region might be too strong or too bland for another. Without a clear picture of what people actually enjoy, companies keep making products that miss the mark, leading to more waste.
Every year, approximately 1.3 billion tonnes of food gets thrown away, wasting $150-200 billion globally. All of it, in part, stemming from one fundamental issue: we don’t truly know what we like.
Embarking on this journey isn’t just about awareness—it’s also about unlocking an entirely new way to experience taste. Imagine a future where we’re not just choosing flavours, but proactively discovering them in a way scientists uncover new medicines.
A world where flavours aren’t just stumbled upon but engineered for pure enjoyment, giving us that "THIS IS SO DELICIOUS" kind of kick every single time.
But beyond the thrill of new tastes, there’s something even bigger at play. No matter how different our culinary cultures are, we’re all connected through flavour. The same core taste sensations exist across the world—just expressed in different ways. Whether it’s the deep umami of a Japanese dashi, the rich savouriness of an Italian ragù, or the smoky spice of a Mexican mole, we might experience flavours differently, but at our core, we all crave and appreciate them in the same form.
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