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Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

 

We kept making the Breyers Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough flavored coffee. 6 times in a row. Every time it kept tasting like just chocolate.

The cookie dough was in the formulation. But all that could be tasted was the chocolate. Pretty good chocolate coffee as far as chocolate coffee goes, but just chocolate. No believability on the cookie dough front.  When you took a sip, your brain kept landing in the same place.

Chocolate.

We kept adjusting the cookie dough component, trying to get the flavor to announce itself more clearly, and the coffee kept pulling everything back toward the chocolate profile.

So we changed the approach and pushed the vanilla. A lot.

And suddenly the coffee stopped reading like chocolate with something in the background. The vanilla brought out the soft, rich, creamy character we were looking for, and the whole profile started to read differently.

The tasting room finally agreed. Cookie dough.

That distinction matters because cookie dough doesn't taste like a chocolate chip cookie before it goes into the oven. It has its own character. It's softer, sweeter and more rounded, with that unmistakable vanilla richness running through the dough.

Once we found that balance, the rest of the flavor made sense.

Part of the problem was the coffee itself. Coffee naturally carries chocolate and cocoa-like notes, so the chocolate already had a head start. We weren't just trying to add cookie dough. We were trying to make it recognizable through a coffee that already wanted to speak chocolate.

Chocolate chips. Sweet dough. Vanilla doing enough work to make the whole thing taste like cookie dough instead of chocolate coffee wearing a cookie dough name.

 

Development Notes

• Several early formulations kept reading primarily as chocolate, even with the cookie dough component present.
• Increasing the cookie dough component wasn't enough to make the profile recognizable. 
• A significant increase in vanilla shifted the balance and brought forward the soft, creamy character we were looking for.

 

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