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VKA Australia
A wide candid view of the VKA Australia flavour bench at Southport, Queensland. Two flavourists at their own evaluation stations side by side, each heads-down at their own smelling strip, each evaluating to their own nose. Warm Queensland window light from the right, a shared wooden rack of amber sample bottles between them, a labelled white linen mat for used strips at the front edge of the bench, an open notebook beside each station.

Innovation · Southport, Queensland

Where Australian
flavours get made.

VKA® Australia has spent 23 years developing custom flavours at our Southport bench. Send us your brief. A real flavourist on our team reads it inside one Australian business day, scopes a fit, and replies. No contract to start.

Read in one Australian business day. No contract to start.

The bench

One Southport site. Bench, application kitchen and plant.

Our analytical bench runs gas chromatography with mass spectrometry, gas chromatography with olfactometry, and high performance liquid chromatography. We take a flavour apart, read what it is made of, and rebuild it to a brief. Every formulation we ship is documented to the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code.

The application kitchen sits beside the bench. A flavour does not leave development until it has been trialled in the real finished product. A beverage in beverage, a bakery system in a baked crumb, a dairy in dairy. If it does not taste right in the actual application, it goes back to the bench.

A calibrated sensory panel sits in the same building. The same flavourist who reads your brief is on the line through bench work, application trial, panel evaluation and ship. The bench, the application kitchen and the manufacturing plant all sit at the Southport site, so a sample can move from formulation to a real production batch without leaving the building.

Top-down close-up of an open clay-canvas formulation notebook on the Southport bench, spread flat as the flavourist reads it. The left page shows a hand-drawn flavour wheel with scribbled radial labels, two crossed-out values and a connecting arrow in the margin. The right page holds free-form irregular notes in mixed cursive and print, each line two or three words, with a small ink smudge at the lower right.

What we do here

Four kinds of work at the bench.

The four bodies of work that run through every brief we take on at Southport.

01

Custom flavours

Natural, nature identical and artificial flavours, formulated to your brief at the Southport bench. Liquid, powder, emulsion or encapsulated, depending on what your application needs.

02

Application work

Every flavour is trialled in the finished product before it ships. Beverage in beverage, dairy in dairy, bakery in a baked crumb. The kitchen sits beside the bench so the loop is short.

03

Sensory

A calibrated sensory panel sits in the same building. Trained evaluators read each candidate against the brief and against the reference, so a flavour is judged against what it is meant to be, not against the last one we made.

04

Naturals and native ingredients

Lemon myrtle, finger lime, Tasmanian pepperberry, davidson plum, golden wattle, anise myrtle and the rest of the Australian native palette, sourced from east coast growers and worked into briefs where they fit.

Inside the bench

Where the flavours get made.

Our R&D suite combines analytical chemistry, application development and a calibrated sensory panel, all in one Southport lab.

A wide view of the VKA Australia flavour bench at Southport. A senior Aboriginal Australian flavourist in her late fifties stands at the back of the bench reviewing a row of used smelling strips on a labelled white linen mat. A junior Korean-Australian male in his mid twenties is heads-down at the next station with his own strip to his own nose. A wooden rack of amber sample bottles sits at the centre of the bench. Both wear clean white lab coats with the VKA wordmark embroidered on the left chest.

Southport bench

A working huddle of three VKA Australia flavourists at the end of the Southport bench, standing around a single amber sample bottle of a prototype flavour. A senior Anglo-Australian male in his fifties holds the bottle gently in his right hand, with the cap upside-down on the bench. Beside him, a junior Indian-Australian female and a junior Korean-Australian male look down at the bottle and talk through the next pass. All in white VKA lab coats with the chest wordmark visible.

Talking through the next pass

Three VKA Australia flavourists at a long bench together, each with their own smelling strip and each evaluating to their own nose. The senior Aboriginal Australian flavourist sits on the left, an Anglo-Australian male in the centre, a Korean-Australian woman on the right. No strip ever passes between them. All heads down at their own work, not posing for camera.

Sensory panel

How a brief moves through the bench

From brief to ship.

Five stages that take a brief from the inbox to a flavour in production. The same flavourist stays on the line the whole way.

01

Brief read

A real flavourist on our Southport team reads your brief inside one Australian business day, scopes a fit, and replies with the questions we need to answer.

02

Bench work

The flavourist who read the brief builds the first candidate at the Southport bench. Analytical work runs alongside formulation so each pass is grounded in data and in nose.

03

Application trial

The candidate goes into the real finished product in the application kitchen beside the bench. If it does not taste right in the actual application, it goes back to the bench.

04

Sensory and sign off

The calibrated sensory panel reads the candidate against the brief and against the reference. You receive samples for your own trial. Notes on either side get worked into the next pass.

05

Ship

The same formulation file moves from pilot batch through to production manufacture at the Southport plant, with documentation aligned to the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code on every batch size.