The future of Flavour Enhancer 621

MSG is one of the best-studied ingredients in savoury flavour.

It is generally regarded as safe and a truly delicious accompaniment to dishes, sauces and meals.

But despite that, it has basically got the same reputation as asbestos: fraught with perceived danger.

Unlike asbestos, though, the broad panic around MSG is bullshit.

The reason can be explained by a Warren Buffett quote:

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”

This edition of supergoods looks at the insane history that embedded that fear - and how new startups are challenging it with interesting products and fearless agendas for change.

Let’s go.

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Chinese Restaurant Syndrome and the reputation killer

In 1968, a doctor named Robert Ho Man Kwok wrote a letter to The New England Journal of Medicine after experiencing symptoms following meals at Chinese restaurants. He floated several possible explanations, including cooking wine and sodium. The journal gave it the headline “Chinese-Restaurant Syndrome”.

It was not a study. No experiment. No control group. No proof that MSG was the cause.

Yet newspapers and magazines treated it like a medical warning. Uncertainty became a culturally sticky story: Chinese food was exotic, suspect and potentially unhealthy.

Early concern was fuelled by anecdote, uncontrolled symptom reporting, and later laboratory and animal work interpreted as if it described ordinary eating.

That does not mean nobody can ever feel rough after consuming a huge dose of pure MSG. It means the popular belief in a dangerous, uniquely Chinese ingredient has no basis.

The result was a durable market semiotic: “No MSG” became shorthand for purity and trustworthiness. Chinese and other Asian foods carried the reputational cost.

How the myth became a marketing asset

By the 1970s, the myth had escaped the lab and entered daily culture.

Chinese restaurants began displaying “No MSG” signs - not necessarily because they believed the ingredient was dangerous, but because the market made the claim a condition of trust.

That is how food lore gets passed down: not through a peer-reviewed paper, but through a parent warning you that Chinese takeaway causes headaches. Through an ingredient blacklist. Through a restaurant owner deciding it is safer to reassure the customer than challenge the premise.

Accounts from within Asian communities tell a version of that story: “NO MSG” signs were everywhere, and even a grandmother would ask restaurants for no mei-jing. The stigma was not merely imposed from outside Asian communities. It became internalised as a strategy for fitting in and avoiding judgement.

The MSG panic found fertile ground in older anti-Chinese and anti-Asian stereotypes: that unfamiliar food was dirty, excessive, mysterious or unsafe.

MSG was never exclusively Chinese. It was in processed Western food, and glutamate occurs naturally in tomatoes, parmesan and mushrooms. But it became a proxy for Chinese food.

The “No MSG” movement is a fascinating branding case study. A claim designed to remove perceived risk became a category convention, then a cultural inheritance. Decades later, the science changed faster than the semiotics.

The brands saying yes

Now, a small group of startups are doing more than adding MSG to a formula: they are trying to change what it means.

Australian brand YES MSG takes the design-led pantry route. It sells a premium grinder - positioning MSG as the third grinder you never knew you needed, alongside salt and pepper. The format makes the ingredient feel tactile, considered and domestic. Not an industrial additive hiding on a back-of-pack panel, but a kitchen object you reach for every night.

Its messaging leans into fermentation, plant origins, umami and lower sodium. Grinding MSG is a ritual. It makes a once-feared food additive feel familiar.

US brand DIME goes straight at the baggage. It makes MSG seasoning blends in loud, modern pouches and frames the brand around Asian-American reclamation. Its proposition is not “don’t worry, this is safe.” It is: we were taught to be embarrassed by this. That was wrong. It makes food taste damn good.

Both are selling seasoning. But both are really selling permission.

Australian brand Umami Papi sits somewhere between the two approaches, using MSG as a core ingredient in its flavour-packed condiments and leaning into its role as a natural source of umami rather than something to hide. Its messaging focuses on flavour first, positioning MSG as a legitimate, even essential, tool for making food taste better - not a shortcut or a compromise.

You do not change a loaded ingredient’s reputation by explaining its chemistry harder. You change its format, ritual and story.

The future of 621

MSG will not replace table salt outright. Salt does jobs MSG cannot: it seasons, preserves, affects texture and carries a cultural role all of its own.

But the next generation may come to see MSG as a complementary third seasoning: a tool to make vegetables, plant-based meals, sauces, soups, snacks and convenience foods hit harder with less reliance on sodium.

MSG contains much less sodium than table salt by weight, and can help preserve savoury impact when salt is reduced. With public-health pressure on sodium still rising, this means brands can make lower-sodium products without sacrificing taste.

My bet is Gen Z will prove more receptive. They have grown up in a food culture that is more globally fluent, more interested in flavour mechanics and less deferential to the wellness orthodoxies their parents inherited. They know gochujang, chilli crisp and nutritional yeast. Umami is already mainstream; MSG is simply the ingredient that has not yet caught up with the trend it helped create.

There will still be resistance. “No added MSG” has spent half a century doing the work of a clean-label halo. It will not disappear overnight.

But the signs of a reset are there. As brands like YES and DIME show, 621 is moving from something that has to be hidden to something that can be designed around.

For the right brand, MSG may not be a liability at all.

It may be the next thing we proudly leave on the table.