Your tongue might be the most underused tool we have for understanding food quality — and for moving consumer buying power toward regenerative farming. Sherry Hess, culinary professional, nutritionist, and founder of Legendary Spice, makes the case that taste is not a nice-to-have. It is a powerful biological signal, and the food processing industry has understood this far longer than we have.

We go deep on the five tastes — salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami — and on why ultra-processed food has been so effective at training us toward intense sweetness while stripping out complexity. Sherry argues that bitterness isn’t a flaw to engineer out; it’s the missing piece tied to polyphenols, antioxidants, detoxification, glucose metabolism, and satiety. The good news: chefs already know how to balance bitter with umami, fat, protein, and spice. We don’t all need to go to culinary school — we just need to borrow a few of their moves.

We also take apart the “chocolate steak syndrome”: the fitness industry has built an entire pipeline of protein products with steak-level nutrition engineered to taste like chocolate and in doing so, trained a generation to completely ignore what flavour is actually telling them. For investors and brand builders, Sherry has a practical provocation: if a product claiming to be regenerative needs five or six flavourings on the label, it’s almost certainly masking the low quality of what’s underneath.

HOW THE FOOD INDUSTRY HIJACKED YOUR PALATE

Taste is already driving purchasing decisions in the food system — just not in the direction we want. Every regenerative farmer and quality-focused brand is already competing on taste whether they know it or not. The problem is that the other side has had a head start of several decades and a whole scientific infrastructure behind it. Sherry has spent years studying how the food processing industry mastered palatability — not to nourish, but to maximise repeat purchase — and why that gap matters enormously for anyone trying to build a different kind of food system.

“And so, the power of taste is huge. And up to this point, the awards go to food processing, right? “Because they understand it, and they know it, and they’re manipulating it.” – Sherry Hess

The mechanism is worth understanding. It goes well beyond adding sugar. And once you see how deliberately it has been constructed — including what non-nutritive sweeteners are quietly doing to the very problem they were designed to solve — it’s hard to look at a product label the same way again.

WHY BITTER IS THE MISSING PIECE

Sherry works with a framework of five tastes — salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami — and uses it to ask a question the nutrient density world has largely avoided: what is each taste actually signalling biologically, beyond whether something is pleasant to eat? The answers are more interesting than you’d expect. But it’s bitter that stops the conversation cold every time, because bitter is the one taste we have been most aggressively trained to reject. That’s exactly the problem.

“Bitter is absolutely it; it is the magic that we are missing in our pal on our pallets and purposely, right?” – Sherry Hess

The evolutionary reason we fear bitter makes sense. What the food industry has done with that instinct is a different story. And the connection between bitter compounds — polyphenols, terpenes, antioxidants — and what regeneratively grown food actually contains is something most farmers in this space are sitting on without knowing how to talk about it.

“We’re dumbing down our taste buds, and it’s really kind of scary.” — Sherry Hess

THE CHOCOLATE STEAK SYNDROME

The fitness and functional food world has built an entire product pipeline around a simple idea: take something with strong nutritional credentials and make it taste like dessert. Steak-level protein, chocolate-level flavour. Sherry has a name for it.

“I call it the chocolate steak syndrome. So, we’ve taken protein, right? We’ve taken all these protein shakes, protein bars, choke protein, whatever, and it’s the protein levels of steak, but we’re making it taste like chocolate.” — Sherry Hess

The implications run deeper than the gym. If we’ve spent years training ourselves to expect dessert-level sweetness from foods we believe are healthy, what does that do to our ability to read what food is actually telling us? And as GLP-1 drugs reshape how millions of people relate to hunger and satiety, Sherry raises a question worth sitting with: what happens when you eat less, but the quality problem remains?

TASTE AS DUE DILIGENCE — THE ARTISAN TROPIC EXPERIMENT

If taste is a genuine signal of food quality, it should be something investors and brand builders pay attention to — not as a preference, but as a form of due diligence. Sherry’s provocation is simple: if a product claiming to be regenerative needs five or six flavourings on its label, what is it covering up? The regenerative food space has spent enormous energy on certifications and nutrient testing. Taste, she argues, might cut through faster than either.

“All of the flavourings in the world have become a placebo for the lack of quality in the food that we’re growing and raising.” — Sherry Hess

The Artisan Tropic story is the clearest illustration of what acting on this actually looks like. The founder sent Sherry his plantain chips alongside three competitors — every label identical. What happened when she tasted them side by side, and what it revealed about how we’ve been trained to evaluate food, is the practical heart of this episode. Sherry calls it tasting beyond the label. It turns out it’s a skill and it can be learned faster than you’d think.

OTHER POINTS DISCUSSED

Koen and Sherry also talked about:

• Retraining your palate over time
• Taste as investment metric
• The orphan study example

LINKS:

• Michael Pollan
• The Dorito Effect
• Eric Smith LinkedIn Post on Satiation
• Burlap and Barrel Spices
• Artisan Tropic
• Slow Food
• TED TALK – Sherry Hess: Your Taste Buds: Ambassadors to Nature

LINKED INTERVIEWS:

• Franco Fubini – Delivering unmatched flavour to 2000 of the world’s top restaurant and unlocking consumer demand
• Lauren Tucker – Inner regen work, gut molds, almonds groves in the Central Valley and taste buds
• Martin Reiter – Building a $100B home for regenerative brands
• Dan Kittredge – Making farmers focus on nutrient dense food
• Eric Smith – Commoditization is the root cause of all ecological destruction and human health impacts
• Fred Provenza – What should we learn from domesticated animals when it comes to food as medicine
• Mary Purdy – Why a supplement company launched a flour product
• Dan Barber – AI-Powered natural breeding: The End of GMOs, Gene Editing, and CRISPR?
• Victor Friedberg, 30m available for food moonshots

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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.