It's funny you should bring up seasonal flavors. I tried doing a holiday flavor sampler pack last year at V4L. One of them became a year round success, but the rest were total bombs, and the Pumpkin Pie goes down as my all time flavor fail to this day.
Pumpkin pie and Key Lime Pie were my two big early lessons on not asking Chinese flavor engineers too much, like duplicating a flavor they've never tasted in their life, without a sample.
Oh, the key lime pie story is another classic tale of chinese/american confusion.
Before I joined V4L, they ordered Key Lime Pie carts and bottles. But what they got tasted like peanuts, so they thought it had been misfilled with the wrong liquid. So we reordered, and I checked the bottle labels myself when the liquid was delivered, to make sure it ws Key Lime Pie. But when I tasted it it still tasted like peanuts.
I knew they couldn't have made the same mistake twice, and I suddenly remembered something else. When I was approving the bottle labels I noticed that the Key Lime Pie label had a jar on it. I asked why, and the designer told me it was a jar of Key Lime Pie. Seemed odd, but they put pumpkin pie filling in a can, so what did I know. Now it occured to me to find out what was really in those jars.
I got ahold of copies of the original purchase order to the liquid supplier, and had my translator read it, and she said it said key lime pie. But then she said it in Chinese, doubanjiang, and told me it is a kind of broad bean sauce. She didn't know before that we called it key lime pie in America, and wanted to know what a lime was, and why we called bean sauce a pie?
I tracked down who had translated the order originally and she admitted that she had no idea what a key lime pie was, and wouldn't say how she came up with broad bean sauce as a translation. I think it was her little FU to Steve.
Anyway, the real kicker is that in those days they didn't listen to me as well as they learned to later, so before I could stop it they had completed the cart order. So there's a couple of thousand Broad Bean Sauce carts pobably still lying around.
