Why Food Brands Are Making Everything Taste Like Space

If I could, against all odds, not only make it to space but also somehow take off my astronaut helmet and stick my tongue out while floating among the stars, I can’t imagine that it would taste great, if it tasted like anything at all. If space dust were to hit my tongue, I don’t expect it would taste like crushed-up Pez — and since I’ve heard it smells like sulfur, maybe there would be an acrid tang, like letting an uncoated pill linger. Do I want to taste space? From this imagining, not exactly.

Increasingly, food brands have been putting themselves through the same thought exercise: How do you capture the taste of space? Right now, I have the option of buying multiple space-flavored foods, all of them approximating the concept from different angles. Some use the lens of realism, drawing on what we know to exist in our galaxy. Others see the prompt more as world-building, dreaming up a galaxy and then flavors that might fit into it. Others still are hopping on the bandwagon in name alone, slapping the word “space” onto releases that would make sense in any other context.

According to brands right now, what does space taste like? Torani, the syrup company, called “galaxy” its flavor of the year. Despite the foreign premise, its composition is familiar — raspberries and rum. Jeni’s, the ice cream company, is scooping Punk Stargonaut, a space-inspired collection that circles around bright mixed-fruit flavors. To me, the flavor combination that reads most like space is found in Jeni’s Supermoon, a swirl of baby blue and pale yellow that’s made with marshmallows and candied violet. It tastes like Lucky Charms marshmallows, which are artificial enough to might as well be alien food. It tastes even more out of this world than astronaut ice cream, which innovated more in texture than in flavor.

There are “Space Dunk” Oreos, which are a lot like a standard Oreo, but offer a “supernova bursting sensation” from popping candy. “Solar Eclipse” SunChips are flavored like pineapple habanero and black bean spicy gouda. Celsius, the energy drink, has a fruit punch-flavored “Cosmic Vibe” can and a blue raspberry-flavored “Astro Vibe.”

Space-themed foods frequently make the rounds, like special Oreos to commemorate the moon landing in 2019; a Space Force-inspired Ben & Jerry’s flavor in 2020, with “toffee meteor clusters orbiting a sugar cookie dough core”; and Coca-Cola’s “space-flavored” Starlight in 2022, which the company described as having “a reddish hue and cooling taste sensation evoking the feeling of a journey to space.” (It tasted like “minty cotton candy sprinkled with vanilla,” according to Food Network.)

But tasting space is especially of interest this year because of the total solar eclipse happening April 8, the likes of which won’t be seen again in the United States for another 20 years. It’s proven to be good for business (restaurants along the path of totality are planning special events to draw in tourists) and for marketing: SunChips’s release will be available only during “the 4 minutes and 27 seconds that the moon’s shadow is passing over the United States,” according to Space.com.

Torani’s “galaxy” flavor is its first foray into the abstract; it previously named black sesame and salted egg yolk its flavors of the year. That departure from more discernible flavors was motivated by a combination of seeing space in the news and interest, especially among younger audiences, in concepts like horoscopes, according to Andrea Ramirez, manager of consumer and customer market insights. Fantasy flavors are also a growing category, she adds, pointing to Starbucks’ unicorn frappuccinos, Polar’s mythical seltzers, and Coca-Cola’s recent experiments.

Raspberry and rum might sound so familiar as to be uncreative, but the company actually took cues from the 2009 discovery of ethyl formate in a dust cloud at the center of the Milky Way. The molecule is known to smell like rum and taste like raspberries. Since rum and raspberries are familiar to most people, “we had something that was a real standard of identity with ethyl formate,” Ramirez says. The foreign nature of space opened up room for interpretation.

“That’s where the mineral note came in,” Ramirez says. She calls this additional flavor “flinty,” a descriptor that’s sometimes used in wine (a flinty wine has an aroma like striking a match against metal, Wine Enthusiast explains). That note completed the story, she says: “We wanted it to have this mysterious flavor that also gave you the sense that maybe it was a little bit otherworldly.”

In contrast, Jeni’s thought more about inventing its own galaxyscape for its new pints. The description of Punk Stargonaut reads: “Inspired by a fictional flight through the galaxy. Where we gathered all of the alien fruits we could find and transformed them into colorful, cosmic ice creams.” Supermoon is described as being “created from the moon dust that glitters in the sky during a harvest supermoon. The dust twinkles powder blue and starry yellow and fills the air like fireflies. Captured best using gossamer nets.”

“It was a little bit more like sci-fi than actual reality,” says Jeni’s director of innovation Beth Stallings. “How do we want to capture this wholly new place that we have imagined and bring that down to earth?” The flavors in the collection also include Nebula Berry, raspberry and blueberry with a hint of elderflower; Purple Star Born, a mix of Concord grape, black currant, and buttermilk; and Cosmic Bloom, a blend of mandarin, tangerine, kiwi, and passion fruit. Are they totally alien? No, but they’re fun — and if you taste and close your eyes, it’s easy to picture the stardust and spaceships that Jeni’s describes.

It came down to thinking about flavor in layers, Stallings explains. Ice cream is especially good for this, since it unfolds as the temperature changes. Making these flavors required grounding through a recognizable element, but then adding a twist. “They’re flavors that you know, but there’s a little bit of mystery too, like maybe you can’t put your finger on the second or third flavor in there,” she says.

No matter what the flavor is, “I think [ice cream] just has this ability to transport us,” Stallings adds. That might be to childhood memories — or to entirely new places and planets.

Additional photo illustration credits: Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, Torani, Oreo, and Shutterstock