It sounds more like a chemical than a food ingredient, and until this week, most consumers had probably never heard of hydrolyzed vegetable protein — let alone realized the additive is found in thousands of processed foods.
But news that millions of kilograms of the ingredient, which is added to flavoured snacks and other pre-packaged foods, is now the subject of a massive salmonella recall has put HVP on the radar of concerned consumers.
In Canada, domestically produced soup mixes, dips, popcorn seasoning and flavoured chips made the recall list. The list will likely grow, as U.S. authorities warned this could become one of the largest food recalls in North America.
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Additive manufacturers including Basic Food Flavors, Inc., the Nevada-based company at the centre of the HVP recall, start out with vegetable scraps or soy extracts.
They are boiled in hydrochloric acid, then neutralized with sodium hydroxide. The acid breaks down the protein into amino acids, one of which is glutamic acid, more commonly known in the form of its sodium salt, monosodium glutamate or MSG.
HVP contains all the amino acids making up the protein, but glutamic acid is the effective flavour enhancer, said Keith Warriner, food science professor at the University of Guelph.
“What used to be used is just pure glutamic acid, usually called monosodium glutamate, because that’s what gives products that sort of meaty flavour. But it’s a bit expensive to produce.”
Warriner chalked up the emergence of HVP as the go-to flavour enhancer in food processing to the drive to keep food costs down while delivering intensively flavoured items.
“We want cheap food, that’s the bottom line. … So processors want to do it as cheaply as possible.”
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