I very upset to hear that Meringue had changed, so I instantly emailed FlavourArt and asked if I could buy the original formula in bulk.
Here's the response I got within an hour:
" ------ Reply above this line ------
Dear *****
In respons to your ticket "Meringue".
Hello You have been wrongly informed as the flavor is the same as before. No changes from our side.
Cordiali saluti/Best regards,
Massimiliano"
From the horses mouth. Now stop telling people it's changed. If it's different to you, it's either 2 things: you're tricking yourself into believing or you vendor is scamming you.
Option 3: inconsistent batch
Option 4: Just because the manufacturer/packager tells you something has not changed does not mean it has not changed. Vermillion River, one of the juice makers (2009), ran into this with his Mystic Cherry. Dave went through over a dozen flavor companies looking for a replacement cherry after his supplier changed their cherry flavoring while swearing up and down that it was the same as before. He talked about it in the chat thread in his supplier's forum over on ECF if you feel like digging.
I've noticed that a lot of recipes on here use meringue. Why is it so popular?
It adds a sweet 'frosted' taste, along with a 'smooth' mouth-feel without taking over other flavors. It helps to round a lot of mixes out.
He also said that FA wouldn't make a change to the formula without notice. IMO he was not technically misinformed because he confirmed some bad merengue that he purchased from more than one vendor. I personally did not experience this (had the same bottle for a while)
>From the horses mouth. Now stop telling people it's changed. If it's different to you, it's either 2 things: you're tricking yourself into believing or you vendor is scamming you.
From the link provided by /u/moggd: The extracts are taken from a flower, the bark, the leaves or roots of plants, from fruits. So the natural starting materials are susceptible to geographical origin, time and method of harvesting, local climatic conditions, storage, breed. Professional processors know this very well and work hard to get consistent supply and quality, and had streamlined their processes, in order to get final products meet exact specifications, but due to inner complexity of ANY natural extract, some minor variations are expected and unavoidable. This can be noted in a slight color or hue difference, in viscosity or in the general chemical composition. All this small variations can bring in the final flavor some small differences as well, mainly noticeable in the color the final flavor get, or in its top note.
So it's more like this: "If it's different to you, it is, and this is due to a very large amount of inconsistency among their natural ingredients sourced from whoever the hell knows under who knows what standards, that ultimately lead to a different product batch to batch."
I'm sorry, but this is pretty ridiculous to me that they could admit their flavorings are so inconsistent and everybody just seems to be fine with it. Here we are in a sub full of people who pride themselves in eliminating even a hundredth of a gram of inaccuracy in order to duplicate their mixes batch to batch, setting up tables with weights and densities for all flavors, etc, and all I see are posts accepting the very first reply FlavourArt sent out, accepting that you will not get the same flavoring upon re-order, and that wild inconsistency is impacting the very thing we're here to do, share recipes with each other that are consistent.