Tic Tac Orange Mints are tiny candy mints that mimic the experience of tasting an orange. Most people don't pay attention to subtle shifts in flavor when they're eating Tic Tacs. If they did, they'd notice how the orange flavor in Tic Tac Orange Mints unfolds like the experience of eating an orange out of hand. Flavor chemists want you to think of the real thing even if the candy doesn't have the same form factor as an orange. The result? Candy plays pretend, and our brain plays right along with it because candy tastes good and it's fun to eat.
Mass-produced candy ensures a specific eating experience every time and that's by design. Candy is a form of comfort and reward across cultures. When we eat candy, we expect it to taste exactly like it did the last time we ate it. When adults eat candy, the everyday chaos of life is sublimated by candy's constancy. Add a few childhood memories and it's easy to get hooked on candy when you are decades past being a kid.
The flavor chemistry in Tic Tac Orange Mints is an industry secret, but if you read the ingredient list you can do a bit of flavor sleuthing and decode what you sense, but can't see. Orange Tic Tacs contain: sugar, maltodextrin, tartaric acid, natural and artificial flavors, rice starch, gum arabic, magnesium stearate, ascorbic acid, Yellow 6 and carnauba wax. So what does this mean? A sweet and sour profile at a quick glance, but there's more.
The first ingredient is sugar (sucrose) and that means a sweet taste is definitely on the menu. This is followed by maltodextrin, a polysaccharide (a carbohydrate comprised of sugar molecules) that improves texture, taste and shelf life. Maltodextrin may or may not add sweetness based on how it's processed (the digestive end product is a single sugar called glucose) when it's not sweet in the mouth via the starch digesting enzyme amylase found in saliva).
The next ingredient, tartaric acid, is found in grapes, bananas, tamarind, citrus and wine. Tartaric acid's salt is potassium bitartrate, aka cream of tartar, which is mixed with sodium bicarbonate to make baking powder. Et voilá. You're touching cooking science by investigating a candy ingredient list. Get yourself a nice glass of wine and congratulate yourself while showing tartaric acid some respect. You've graduated from Sweet Tarts, Fun Dip and Smarties Candy Necklaces, which include a combination of malic acid and tartaric acid to create delightful puckering effects that turned you into a candy fiend in the first place.
Natural and artificial flavors cited in the ingredient list for Tic Tac Orange Mints are just that. Specific molecular constituents used to shape the candy's unique taste and flavor are akin to the recipe for grandma's pasta sauce—the people who know the recipe are the people who are allowed to know (proprietary industry knowledge covered by binding non-disclosure agreements). Natural flavors in candy are usually "nature-identical". This means that singular aroma molecules found in orange fruit that scream "oranges" when they're smelled or tasted are used to shape Tic Tac "orange" flavor. Artificial flavors created in the lab via organic chemistry may or may not be found in nature on their own.
Gum arabic is ubiquitous as far as food use goes and commonly added to confectionary glazes (it's currently added to water in powdered form and touted as a probiotic). Rice starch is used to smooth the surface of confectionary coatings and has other applications as well, so no assumptions are being made here. Magnesium stearate, on the other hand, prevents ingredients from sticking to mechanical equipment in the manufacturing process. It's commonly used as a lubricant for tablets and Tic Tacs look like pills, so there's that.
Ascorbic acid is also on the Tic Tac Orange Mints ingredient list. You may recognize it if you've read the ingredients label on a bottle of vitamins because ascorbic acid is another name for vitamin C. This doesn't mean that Tic Tac Orange Mints are vitamins, so you can't use this fact to make candy guilt go away or use Tic Tac Orange Mints to raise Linus Pauling from the dead.
Yellow 6 is also known as "sunset yellow" in the language of artificial food colors. Artificial colors are shelf stable (they don't lose their color quickly over time and under the proper storing conditions). This could change as companies like Kalsec, which specializes in natural food color technology, offer stable natural color alternatives. It's interesting to note that Orange Tic Tac Mints sold outside the U.S. are colorless (they're white) due to rules and regulations related to artificial food coloring. In Canada, for instance, Tic Tac Orange Mints are packed in a plastic container that's tinted orange to signal flavor expectations.
Carnauba wax (Copernicia cerifera) is the last ingredient in Orange Tic Tac Mints and it's typically used as a coating or glazing ingredient. It's also one of the first ingredients you'll encounter in a store-bought orange (before you get to the cash register where Tic Tacs galore are staring you in the face). Carnauba wax is used in a proprietary form of artificial fruit wax that coats and protects fruit that's packaged and shipped to grocery stores.
Now that you know the story behind the ingredients in Orange Tic Tac Mints, it's time to do a little sensory evaluation on your own. The experience will tell you a lot about what flavorists do without saying a word. To get the most out of this or any other tasting exercise, make sure to take your time. If you do it too quickly, you'll miss key flavor transition points.
Go somewhere where you can close the door, taste some candy and close your eyes. The experience goes beyond "sweet, sour, done, now give me another one". Pop a single orange Tic Tac in your mouth and savor it, noticing the sequence of sensations from beginning to end. Do it twice. Once for the ah-ha moment(s) and a second time to embed the experience in your brain as a reference point. Welcome to your senses. Imagine what science class would have been like if exercises like this were included in the curriculum. You wouldn't be reading this. You'd be a flavorist working at a lab bench making flavors for candy.
Mindfully tasting Orange Tic Tac Mints is akin to a candified experience of eating an orange. Ephemerality exists when the candy is finished versus seasonal availability of oranges, which is dependent on pollination (bees), farming practices, climate and trade. Is natural better? Sure it is, but when you can't find your favorite fruit in season or if you live in a country where certain fruits don't grow candy, it allows you dream in flavors and there's nothing wrong with that.
Notes & Curiosities:
Molecules that comprise orange fruit aroma number in the hundreds. Flavorists generally work with dominant molecules that define the character of a fruit.
There is no mint flavor in Tic Tac Orange Mints. The term is used as an indicator of something a person eats for refreshment (that and the fact that the company started out making "mint" mints).
Mindfully eating Tic Tac Orange Mints can be included in chemistry curriculum so that students grow up to be adults with a métier in flavor science. More information on becoming a flavorist (and/or flavor chemist) is available from The Society of Flavor Chemists.
