Taste has stopped being a nice-to-have in supplements. As Kerry’s 2026 Taste Charts put it, “taste becomes a non-negotiable in the supplements space” [1]. That pressure doesn’t stop at the formats getting the most attention right now. Capsules can bury a bitter active before the tongue notices it, but powders have no shell to hide behind, an active goes straight into water or a shake and straight onto the tongue. Softgels sit in between: swallowed whole like a capsule, but with a liquid fill that has to survive the moment before it goes down. Across capsules, softgels, and powders, taste is a formulation variable, not an afterthought.

Why bitterness happens in the first place

Bitter compounds bind to the TAS2R family of taste receptors, roughly 25 G-protein coupled receptors on the tongue, triggering a signaling cascade the body uses to flag potentially toxic or physiologically active substances [2]. This is precisely why the actives formulators most need to mask, alkaloids, polyphenols, mineral salts, and bioactive peptides, tend to be inherently bitter. Bioactivity and bitterness share a chemical root. A 2024 retrospective analysis of 155 active pharmaceutical ingredients found the same pattern in stark numbers: 65% had bitterness as their primary aversive attribute, and more than 90% carried multiple aversive attributes at once [3]. Supplement actives aren’t pharmaceutical actives, but they’re built from overlapping chemistry, alkaloids, peptides, mineral salts, so the same pattern shows up in this category too.

You can’t treat bitterness as a cosmetic afterthought to fix at the end of a formulation. It’s a built-in signal tied to the same chemistry that makes an ingredient effective, so a masking strategy has to work with that chemistry, not around it.

Supplement actives complicate the picture further

“Bitter” is not one flavor. An alkaloid like berberine activates TAS2R receptors differently than a ginsenoside from panax ginseng, and both behave differently than the metallic bitterness of magnesium or the peptide bitterness in a whey or collagen hydrolysate [4]. A masking approach tuned to one won’t necessarily work on another.

A flavor system that solves berberine’s bitterness can fail completely on a protein hydrolysate. Difficult actives resist one-size-fits-all flavor systems and require compound-specific strategies.

Four approaches formulators use, and what each one costs

• Coating and microencapsulation. Physical barriers keep bitter compounds from reaching taste buds, commonly used with fish oil concentrates and probiotic strains where both taste and stability matter [5]. The same barriers can delay dissolution if not engineered carefully, and generally allow lower active loading per dose.
• Cyclodextrin inclusion complexation. Cyclodextrins trap bitter molecules structurally so they can’t reach receptors. Curcumin is the clearest supplement-world example: forming an inclusion complex with cyclodextrin has been shown to mask its bitterness effectively while also improving its notoriously poor solubility [6]. The tradeoff is the same one seen in pharma: masking a high-dose active this way can require impractically large amounts of cyclodextrin relative to the active.
• Debittering and encapsulation of bitter peptides. Protein hydrolysates, whey, collagen, and plant proteins, generate bitter peptides during enzymatic hydrolysis, driven by hydrophobic amino acids exposed at the peptide ends [7]. Formulators address this through selective separation, encapsulation, or further enzymatic treatment, changing how the peptide is presented rather than eliminating the bitterness at its source.
• Sweetener synergy. Stevia and monk fruit are frequently blended for this reason. Stevia alone can carry a bitter, herbal aftertaste at higher concentrations, while monk fruit’s mogrosides round that off. One patented monk fruit and rebaudioside blend puts real numbers behind that pairing: in expert sensory panel testing, the blended formulation scored lower on bitterness and higher on overall acceptability than a standard monk fruit and rebaudioside-A control, and in a lemon-lime beverage test, 65% of panelists preferred it over a rebaudioside-A-only formulation [8]. It’s why this kind of blending shows up so often in protein shakes and greens powders.

“When I think about flavor masking, two things come to mind when choosing the right approach: entanglement and enmeshment, and which one makes sense depends on the ingredient you’re working with. With something like a cyclodextrin, you’re getting entanglement, the bitter molecule gets pulled into the cavity and trapped there so it never reaches the receptor. With a coating or hot-melt extrusion, you’re getting enmeshment instead, the active gets embedded in a physical matrix so it releases slower and never fully hits the tongue.”

— Nick, VP of Product Development, Lief Organics

Every technique trades off against dose and delivery. Picking one isn’t about finding the single “best” method, it’s about matching the method to the active’s dose, its solubility, and which class of bitter compound is actually in the formula.

Which method fits which format

Format matters as much as the active itself. Capsules and softgels mostly sidestep the problem since they’re swallowed intact with minimal tongue contact, which is why a lot of genuinely bitter botanicals just ship in capsule form rather than getting masked at all. Softgels add one more variable: the liquid fill has to hold up in suspension, and a shell that’s too thin, or that opens before it’s fully swallowed, reintroduces the exact taste problem it’s supposed to avoid.

Powders are the toughest of the three to mask for, because there’s no shell at all. An active goes straight into water or a shake and hits the tongue directly, which is why powders lean hardest on coating and sweetener synergy: coated particles stay intact until they hit liquid, and a well-tuned sweetener blend covers what coating alone can’t. Cyclodextrin shows up less often here, since the loading requirement gets expensive at the volumes a powder SKU usually needs. Protein powders carry a fifth consideration on top of that: peptide debittering, which is specific to hydrolysate-based products and doesn’t apply outside them.

Liquids and ready-to-drink formats, outside Lief’s core lineup but worth noting, favor cyclodextrin, since it solves solubility and bitterness at the same time, something a liquid system needs anyway.

Chewables and gummies sit at the far end of the difficulty spectrum industry-wide: the mechanical action of chewing breaks down physical barriers fast, so cyclodextrin and sweetener synergy end up carrying most of the load. It’s not a format Lief runs, but it’s a useful illustration of why format and active have to be solved together, not separately.

The active determines what class of bitterness you’re dealing with. The format determines which techniques can actually survive long enough to work.

The takeaway

Effective flavoring in supplements rarely comes down to a single ingredient swap or a bigger dose of sweetener. It’s a formulation decision made compound by compound and format by format.

Resources

1. Kerry. (2026). “Taste Meets Function: How Taste Is Becoming a Competitive Edge in Supplements.” Kerry Digest.
2. Mennella, J.A. & Beauchamp, G.K. (2013). “The Bad Taste of Medicines: Overview of Basic Research on Bitter Taste.” Clinical Therapeutics, 35(8).
3. Tisi, D.A. & Worthington, J.H. (2024). “Taste Masking Challenge of 155 Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients.” Medical Research Archives, 12(10). DOI: 10.18103/mra.v12i10.5890
4. Zhang, Y., et al. (2026). “Bitter Compounds in Medicinal Food Plants Based on Traditional Chinese Medicine: Analysis and Regulation Strategies from Chemical Structure to Perception Mechanisms.” Molecules, 31(12), 2192. DOI: 10.3390/molecules31122192
5. Eratte, D., Dowling, K., Barrow, C.J., & Adhikari, B. (2018). “Recent advances in the microencapsulation of omega-3 oil and probiotic bacteria through complex coacervation: A review.” Trends in Food Science & Technology, 71, 121–131. DOI: 10.1016/j.tifs.2017.10.014
6. Wang, D., Wei, B., Zhang, Y., Xie, T., Yu, J., Xue, Y., Kong, B., Xue, C., & Tang, Q. (2024). “Multifunctional curcumin/gamma-cyclodextrin/sodium chloride complex: A strategy for salt reduction, flavor enhancement, and antimicrobial activity in low-sodium foods.” Food Chemistry.
7. Liu, Y., et al. (2022). “Review on the release mechanism and debittering technology of bitter peptides from protein hydrolysates.” Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety.
8. Quinlan, M.E. & Zhou, Y. (2017). U.S. Patent No. 9,609,887 B2, “Sweetener compositions containing monk fruit extract and rebaudiosides A and B.” Tate & Lyle Ingredients Americas LLC.