Sensapure Flavors made waves at Expo West 2026 with a live SensaNaturals Tropicooler demo and news of a new Lehi, Utah facility that nearly triples production capacity.
Sensapure Flavors showed up to Expo West 2026 with two pieces of news worth paying attention to. Head of Business Development and Innovation Lauren Howard walked attendees through a live SensaNaturals demo, pouring cups of a prebiotic fiber soda on the show floor. And Senior VP of Sales and Marketing Tony Colalillo announced a new manufacturing facility in Lehi, Utah set to open this spring.
If you’re already familiar with SensaNaturals from our December 2025 launch coverage, Expo West gave us the first real live-product look at what the platform actually tastes like. And if you follow Sensapure closely, the Lehi expansion is a big deal for capacity.
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SensaNaturals in Action: The Tropicooler Demo
The SensaNaturals-based demo beverage at Expo West was Tropicooler — a fiber soda built on prebiotic fiber and flavored using a combination of orange juice powder, pineapple juice powder, and orange oil extract. There’s just a hint of coconut used as well. The label reads exactly as those ingredients appear: no “natural flavors” declaration needed anywhere.
That’s the whole point of SensaNaturals. Rather than using conventional natural flavors, Sensapure builds flavor profiles from whole fruit parts: purees, juice concentrates, whole fruit extracts, and fruit powders, spray-dried onto gum acacia into a powder-soluble format that works in both RTD and RTM applications.
Lauren framed the label story clearly: “People recognize strawberry, watermelon, pineapple a lot quicker, and they’re a lot more comfortable with it than natural flavors.”
The Tropicooler itself was light, fresh, and noticeably less sweet than juice. A coconut fruit powder in the blend contributed more to flavor complexity than to outright taste, one of the levers Sensapure uses to keep SensaNaturals profiles from reading flat or one-dimensional. Sensapure currently offers around 20 SensaNaturals flavors spanning fruits, chocolates, and vanillas.
The Bulk and Carb Efficiency Angle
One thing Lauren emphasized that doesn’t come through in a product description alone: SensaNaturals is dramatically more efficient by weight than freeze-dried fruit powders.
Freeze-dried fruit powders add carbs and bulk fast. If you’re trying to hit a reasonable COGS on a can or keep your stick pack serving size manageable, stacking 2 to 3 grams of freeze-dried fruit per serving to get real-fruit flavor is a real problem. SensaNaturals reaches the same flavor impact at roughly a quarter of that input by concentrating flavor directly from the fruit rather than drying the whole thing.
For brands building in the clean-label space that also need to control carbs — think low-carb RTDs, functional stick packs, or any SKU where label real estate and macro count both matter — that efficiency is a genuine advantage.
New Territory: SensaNaturals Blockers
This one flew under the radar in Sensapure’s December launch announcement, but Lauren mentioned it at Expo West: SensaNaturals Blockers.
Sensapure Flavors launched SensaNaturals Flavor Solutions, a clean-label flavor platform built from whole-food ingredients. Instead of “natural flavors” on labels, you get actual ingredient names. Real transparency for functional foods and beverages.
The Blockers use plant-derived ingredients to provide bitter-blocking capability without triggering a “natural flavors” declaration on the label. Gentian root extract was the example Lauren gave: it shows up on the ingredient panel exactly as that: gentian root extract. Clean, recognizable, no mystery.
The practical application she described is covering difficult actives in clean-label products. Paraxanthine and BHB were her specific callouts — both carry noticeable bitterness that Sensapure has tackled in conventional flavor applications before. The SensaNaturals Blocker approach lets brands solve that bitterness problem while keeping the ingredient panel clean and transparent.
This is a major extension of what the SensaNaturals platform can do, since it’s not just about swapping “natural flavors” for fruit powders on a simple RTD. It means the platform can now compete in harder categories with tough, bitter active ingredients that have historically required heavy flavor work to be drinkable. We’ve covered Sensapure’s masking capabilities across protein and novel ingredient challenges in depth, and the Blockers line extends that story into clean-label territory.
Lehi, Utah: New Facility Opening This Spring
Tony used Expo West to announce a second facility in Lehi, Utah, roughly 35 minutes south of Sensapure’s Salt Lake City location. They purchased the building in 2024 and have been preparing it for production since.
The Lehi facility is designed to bring Sensapure to roughly 2.5 to 3x their current production capacity. Both the SLC and Lehi locations will include a full lab and an Alchemy Lounge, the tasting room format Sensapure uses for customer sampling and application work.
The capacity growth targets the beverage market directly. Tony’s framing was straightforward: brands that started as D2C companies are moving into retail, and that jump requires a different level of premix capability and order support. The Lehi facility is designed to be that partner for brands making that transition.
Tyrus Sciarra, Sensapure Flavors’ high-energy sales expert, breaks down flavor science, industry trends, and the natural vs. artificial debate on Episode #179 of the PricePlow Podcast, recorded at IFT First 2025.
The open house is planned for spring 2026, with the exact date depending on construction timelines. Reach out to Sensapure directly at Sensapure.com for details on attending.
Sensapure Keeps Building
Between SensaNaturals, the Blockers extension, and a facility that nearly triples production capacity, Sensapure is putting real infrastructure behind the positioning they’ve been building at SupplySide Global, IFT First, and in our podcast conversation with Tyrus Sciarra: they’re the flavor house you call when your product isn’t quite there yet.
To request a SensaNaturals sample or kick off a lab project, reach out at info@sensapure.com . Subscribe below for updates as the Lehi facility opens.
