Say a company wants to manufacture and sell a dip in grocery stores like Kroger, Walmart, Safeway, etc…
First they need to hire a chef to make the recipe. Someone who will taste it and say…
Hummm. Needs a little bit more “HYDROLYZED TORULA AND BREWERS YEAST PROTEIN”.
Or needs a little less “SODIUM HEXAMETAPHOSPHATE”.
Or maybe we should add some “SODIUM ERYTHORBATE”.
There. That tastes just right!
Are these people called “chefs”? Where would they go to school and what would their training be?
Likely not a “chef” in the way you’re thinking (i.e., most of the people in that sort of job didn’t go to culinary school, as a professional chef would). People who develop food products for grocery stores are generally known as “food scientists.” Yes, it’s a degree program – I know a number of them, including people with master’s degrees and even doctorates in the field.
Edit: Food science - Wikipedia
You need to watch more of those shows like “Food Factory” and “How It’s Made”.
The ingredient lists are somewhat deceptive, in that they list all ingredients that go into the product, regardless of source.
So while the actual product as made, may have a relatively complex looking ingredient list with stuff like “sodium hexametaphosphate”, if you watch it being made, a lot of those odd ingredients are often part of the actual ingredients, not specific additives to the finished product.
So for example, you may see something like “polydimethylsiloxane” as an ingredient in something that was fried, like say potato chips. That doesn’t mean that some weirdo in a lab coat came along with a little bottle of polydimethylsiloxane and dumped it into the product, but rather that the frying oil comes from the factory with a little bit of it added to modify the surface tension and reduce splatter and foaming during frying.
Some food scientist probably figured out that there’s a percentage of polydimethylsiloxane that is ideal for frying with that specific blend of oils, but the people making the potato chips may or may not even know that it’s in there, other than whoever makes their labels.
Similarly, the hydrolyzed torula and brewer’s yeast is just a yeast-based flavoring that is effectively the same thing as monosodium glutamate, but they don’t have to label it that way.
Sodium erythorbate is an antioxidant, used in foods primarily to either accelerate the curing process of meats by speeding up the nitrite/nitrate changes, or as an antioxidant. Chemically, it’s the sodium salt of erythorbic acid, which happens to be a stereoisomer of ascorbic acid (vitamin C), which means that it’s the same molecular formula, just arranged differently in space.