In Florida, University of Florida scientists are working on making your tomato juice taste better by extracting tomato essence and then adding it back to the juice during processing. Essence, usually extracted from a plant to add flavor or provide a scent can be used to improve juice flavor.
Juices often need to be pasteurized before they are consumed and during that process, the volatiles that give a juice flavor are lost. But, the tomato industry does not use tomato essence to produce tomato juice.
In the study, researchers used Garden Gem tomatoes as the premium flavor tomato and Roma tomato as the control flavor. The Garden Gem retained more of its flavor after pasteurization and was found as a suitable variety for essence production because of a high content of flavor volatiles, thus leading scientists to believe this system will provide better flavor when they test it on consumers.