Fresh flavor pastes – effectively serving the taste buds of ISS’s customers

We test-produced food for the public sector in Paimio using, among others, pepper, herb, and garlic fresh flavor pastes. We made one casserole using crushed pepper and dried herbs, and another casserole using atSauce’s flavor pastes. In a blind test, the casserole made with atSauce’s products was better.

“Pepper that usually gets stuck between your teeth doesn’t really flavor the liquid, and the taste of dried herbs becomes mild when heated. With fresh flavor pastes, the flavors kind of exploded into the liquid and the potatoes absorbed the flavors,” Terhi explains.

Preparing food with fresh flavor pastes is efficient and consistent. With one effort, the same dish is made for a small child and an older student. A smaller amount of flavor pastes is first added and mixed into food for daycare children. The same pastes are added in slightly larger amounts to the dishes that go to older students, who prefer stronger flavors.

“There’s no longer a need to add separately a little pepper from one package, a little curry from another, a little salt, a little stock powder, and so on. Now you just add one spoon of this fresh flavor paste and one spoon of that, and mix mix,” Terhi describes.

Artificial ingredients easily come through in taste. If the background flavor of food comes from artificial stock powder or vegetable broth containing yeast extracts and monosodium glutamate, even gochujang or something more exotic may not help. With fresh flavor pastes, nothing extra comes through in the taste; the food tastes authentic.

“atSauce’s products are easy to incorporate into recipes. I already have a huge number of wishes for new flavor possibilities, but for now we’ll go with these and see how things develop from here,” Terhi enthuses.

Fresh flavor pastes are a sustainable choice

Side streams may not mean anything to the average person if they don’t work in the field. They refer to so-called waste materials. Side streams are waste that does not go directly onto the customer’s plate as food.

In the food industry, there are many ways to significantly influence sustainability. Fermentation is a way to process side streams into spices instead of them ending up in the trash.

“There can be a negative tone associated with side streams. But waste food is actually good food. It also includes second-grade produce (such as cucumbers, tomatoes, swedes) that doesn’t qualify as first grade. They aren’t the right shape and are left in the fields as food,” Terhi adds.

At ISS, there is a desire to contribute to sustainable development in food preparation. The company is not directly against red meat, but rather ISS brings alternatives.

Using fresh flavor pastes increases the consumption of plant-based food. Customers should not have to choose between meat or vegetarian food, but rather choose what is tasty, high-quality, and nutritious. This is positive greenwashing: “Sometimes talking about ecology is just explaining things away, but this is the real deal,” Terhi states. In 2024, ISS won the Finnish Best Organic Buyer and User award among large private operators.

Terhi wants atSauce Oy to be involved in innovation when trying to bring more organic products to the market: “Organic side-stream produce is left in the fields and is attempted to be sold at a normal price. I thought that maybe it could somehow be used in atSauce’s fermented salad dressing.”

How has chefs’ work changed after the introduction of fresh flavor pastes?

Terhi reminisces about old times: “Back when I was a head chef, all pastes were made in-house. If we made Asian flavors, we bottled turmeric, curry, and paprika into oil bottles. Once opened and kept at room temperature, they lasted a maximum of a week, meaning they were made and then thrown away.”

Cooking is still creative, but creativity isn’t just about adding different ingredients from jars. More important is how you use spices and how you decorate the dish and think about different structures; flavor, mouthfeel, texture, and so on. Using fresh flavor pastes and sauce bases still allows for creative food preparation.

“Before, we competed over who was the best. But that’s in the past, and now we need to look at things as they are today. We must think about sustainable products. At the same time as thinking about the planet, we recognize that people still want to eat good food. Chefs of my generation have had to change their approach many times to reach today, but the new generation of chefs has been born into all of this.”

ISS provides restaurant services around the world. The company aims to prevent environmental impacts from its services and support its customers’ own carbon neutrality goals. A significant reduction in food waste now and in the coming years is one concrete example. Modern technology helps reduce waste across thousands of locations worldwide.

As a product manager and head chef, Terhi ensures that decisions support chefs’ success. In this case, the decision was to use fresh flavor pastes. It is cost-effective, consistent, and minimizes waste. atSauce produces on a large scale, and the result is a product that can be stored at room temperature or refrigerated.