mona, first taste of dashi
3 years
300 tastes
20,000 photographs
my wife and I turned weaning into a project:
document every first taste Mona experienced.
I couldn't stop thinking about that moment.
What started as a playful obsession became something I couldn't look away from: a child with no agenda, no habits, no preconceptions. Just an honest, unfiltered reaction to flavour.
What she showed me was simple and inconvenient in equal measure. Flavour, specifically umami, doesn't just make food taste better. It changes what we're willing to eat and whether we come back for more. I watched Mona reject vegetables and devour the exact same vegetables the moment they were cooked into something rich and satisfying.
I'd seen and overlooked the same dynamic in the lab for years, but all it took was a baby to make it obvious.
In food product development, the brief always comes with a trade-off.
"flavour, specifically umami, doesn't just make food taste better. It changes what we're willing to eat and whether we come back for more."
cleaner label?
expect to lose functionality.
better nutrition?
something in the taste usually suffers.
I've spent more hours than I can count managing these trade-offs.
And the honest truth is that most of the time you don't solve them. You find the least bad compromise and call it done.
My daughter didn't accept least bad compromises, she just pushed the plate away.
So I started asking a different question. Not how do we optimise what already exists? And what if the starting point was wrong? What if there was an ingredient that delivered taste, texture, and nutrition not in tension with each other, but simultaneously?
That question became SUMM and our ingredients our way to answer it.
And Mona loves her vegetables now, which makes it a double success.
by Frederik Jensen
Founder and CEO
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