Most of the drinks are prepared from extracts or infusions of various roots, berries, barks or herbs with a suitable solvent or diluents, or they may be made from the jucie and pulp of various fruits.
Essential oils are sometimes added in some of the flavors and in a few cases synthetic flavors are used. Synthetics flavors are very complex and may easily contain hundreds of distinct compounds.
Flavors used in soft drinks can be divided into main types based on solubility in water.
Water soluble flavors present no major problems when used in beverages, as there is ample water in a beverage formulation to dissolve and disperse the relatively small amounts of flavor required.
A flavor containing oil components that are not soluble in water cannot be used directly in the formulation as the oil is not miscible with sugar solution.
Normally, there are two common methods are sued to utilize essential oil to flavor the beverages.
The first method involves separating out the water-soluble fraction of the essential oils by extraction and distillation and the second method is to convert the oil into a water dispersible emulsion such as beverage flavor emulsion.
Flavors of soft drink
