Bengaluru, Sept. 14 -- The table looks deceptively ordinary. There are four bowls of onion bajjis (onion fritters), with their crisp golden edges curled and the scent of fried batter hanging in the air. To the untrained eye, they look identical. But inside flavour, fragrance and aroma consultancy Confluence Valley's five-acre office in Hosur, a Tamil Nadu town about 50 km from Bengaluru, these fritters are part of a controlled experiment. One batch is plain, another carries an engineered 'fat aroma' mixed into the batter, a third has the aroma infused in the oil, and the fourth has it both in the oil and the batter.

What looks like a simple snack is, in fact, science at work.

Fat aroma, as managing director Baskaran Parameswaran explain...