Are the blueberries in that bagel real or imitation? Kathy Brophy’s job is to make sure consumers’ tastebuds never know the difference. Brophy is a food scientist at Custom Industries, which makes “flavor bits” and decorations for commercial food manufacturers. A typical day can include tweaking a cookie recipe 20 times — then sampling a cookie from each batch. Or she might test synthetic blueberries to create a product that bakes as long as the bagels in which they are contained.
