Why Taste Remains an Overlooked Barrier to Medical Nutrition Compliance

dsm-firmenich is calling on medical nutrition manufacturers to treat taste and sensory experience as a formulation priority rather than an afterthought, pointing to flavor rejection as a leading driver of patients discontinuing oral nutritional supplements.¹

The company is positioning its flavor and taste-modulation portfolio, built specifically for medical nutrition applications, to be incorporated during initial product design rather than added after a formula's nutritional profile is finalized.

“Patients who rely on medical nutrition are often already navigating some of life's most challenging moments," said Tom Pugh, senior director of global marketing for medical nutrition at dsm-firmenich, in the company's announcement. "Getting the essential nutrition they need should never feel like an additional burden. By moving beyond masking and designing for the full sensory experience, we can help transform nutrition from something patients tolerate into something they actively choose and enjoy every day, supporting better adherence and better outcomes.”

For manufacturers, the announcement reflects a broader question the medical nutrition category continues to face: how much of a formula's clinical value is lost when patients simply stop drinking or eating it?

Why Does Taste Affect Adherence to Oral Nutritional Supplements?

Oral nutritional supplements are used to address malnutrition risk in populations including older adults, cancer patients, and people recovering from illness or surgery, and their clinical benefit depends on patients actually consuming the prescribed amount.

In fact, a 2024 systematic mixed-studies review of 171 studies on oral nutritional supplement adherence identified product tolerance and satisfaction, alongside patients' health status, motivation, and the quality of healthcare support around supplementation, as key factors shaping whether patients continued using these products as directed.²

That review's inclusion of taste and product satisfaction as a recurring adherence factor, across a literature base spanning both cancer and older-adult populations, lends independent support to the general premise behind dsm-firmenich's announcement.

What Does This Signal for Medical Nutrition Formulators?

The announcement frames taste as a formulation input alongside nutritional composition rather than a downstream fix, which would mean involving flavor and sensory technology earlier in development rather than masking an already-finalized formula. Whether that sequencing meaningfully improves real-world adherence, as opposed to consumer-reported taste preference in survey settings, is not addressed in the announcement itself and would require adherence data from finished products rather than ingredient-level sensory testing.

What Are the Limitations of This Announcement?

The consumer statistics cited come from company-referenced survey research rather than a peer-reviewed source, and the announcement does not include data from a specific finished product, clinical trial, or adherence study demonstrating that dsm-firmenich's taste-modulation technologies improve actual patient compliance or health outcomes.

The relationship it draws between taste satisfaction and therapeutic results is presented as a rationale for its product development approach rather than as a documented clinical finding.

References

1. dsm-firmenich advances patient-centric medical nutrition solutions with focus on taste and enjoyment. Press release. dsm-firmenich. September 3, 2026. Accessed September 4, 2026. https://www.dsm-firmenich.com/en/businesses/health-nutrition-care/news/press-releases/2026-09-03-dsm-firmenich-advances-patient-centric-medical-nutrition-solutions-with-focus-on-taste-and-enjoyment.html

2. Liljeberg E, Payne L, Skinnars Josefsson M, Söderström L, Einarsson S. Understanding the complexity of barriers and facilitators to adherence to oral nutritional supplements among patients with malnutrition: a systematic mixed-studies review. Nutr Res Rev. 2024;38(2):407-427. doi:10.1017/S0954422424000192