10-02-2025 10:24am

Inside McCormick's

Innovator Interviews: McCormick’s Samantha Goldkamp

By Mercedes Cardona, brand-innovators.com

Many marketing efforts come down to a matter of taste. That’s quite literally the case for McCormick & Co.

The spice company has been riding the wave of flavor trends since 1889. Besides its own brand of spices, it sells sauces and condiments including French’s mustard, Old Bay seasoning and Cholula hot sauce.

In 2000, McCormick started leveraging its knowledge in its annual Flavor Forecast, which highlights the trends in flavorings that are emerging among home cooks and in the food industry. This year’s forecast singles out three trends—tropical tastes, charred and smoky flavors and unexpected pairings such as hot honey. The forecast also crowns a trending flavor of the year; in 2025 it is aji amarillo, the sweet pepper used in South American cooking that Americans may have encountered on Peruvian roast chicken, which is featured in a new seasoning product.

The goal of the Flavor Forecast has remained constant since 2000: to showcase McCormick’s leadership in the flavors industry, says Samantha Goldkamp, VP, global marketing transformation, B2B, licensing & partnerships at McCormick & Co. Besides selling products to consumers at retail and to the food services industry, the company creates flavors for other consumer packaged goods marketers for their own products.

“McCormick is the leader in flavor, and this is a great thought leadership initiative to showcase that,” says Goldkamp. “As far as the execution, that has certainly changed over time.”

The launch of the forecast was initially more focused on the enterprise side of the business—the CPG and restaurant clients—but in recent years has expanded its reach to consumers directly, as well. The channels used to support the effort have also evolved to include more social media and events. Last year, McCormick collaborated with the burger chain Black Tap on a menu takeover that included dishes featuring tamarind, its 2024 flavor of the year.

Goldkamp spoke to Brand Innovators about the evolution of the Flavor Forecast from McCormick’s Maryland headquarters where the Brand Innovators Marketing innovation Summit will be held September 10. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How has the activation around the Flavor Forecast changed recently?

We started to crank it up and say: How can we really get the word out to consumers? There’s always been a press release. There’s always been the end-of-year roundups. But last year was the first year that we really started to ramp up that activation with a big focus on experience.

Back in February, we took over a night market in Miami. There were 35 vendors, and each vendor was featuring a food with our flavor of the year, Aji Amarillo, in it. That was through their own lens. We didn’t tell them what they had to do, but instead we said: “Based on what you’re comfortable with, bring Aji Amarillo to life for us.” It was just this incredibly rich cultural immersion of both the flavor, Aji Amarillo, and each vendor’s very authentic take on it. It created a really great tasting experience and opportunity.

The other thing that we were able to do is think about the multiple audiences we cater to. The night market itself had over 10,000 people come through in the course of the weekend. We know that an enormous number of them were able to try Aji Amarillo. It was in dishes. It was in beverages. The bar owned by the vendor for the night market did takeovers of the menu with all Aji Amarillo-inspired drinks. There were a lot of different ways that the consumers could try it.

We also did a series of VIP tastings, and that was really designed to cater to media, influencers, and our customers. We were able to bring certain customers to the market and let them have a more in-depth experience. Our culinary team walked them through the forecast, why we love the trends and the flavor of the year, why we believe that’s really what’s coming to the future of flavor, and then also bring forward some of the vendor dishes. They got to do a curated tasting of both McCormick’s take on Aji Amarillo, as well as the vendors’ take on it, which was really incredible for balancing both of those audiences.

McCormick unveils its 2025 Flavor of the Year: Aji Amarillo, a pepper native to South America featuring fruity, tropical notes with moderate heat.

How do you pull together the Forecast?

The Flavor Forecast is a year-long initiative for us. As we wrap up one year’s edition, we’re immediately working on the next one.

The specifics of it are proprietary, but essentially what we do is we tackle it from two sides. The first is doing trend potting, digging into what’s popping on social right now, leveraging Google search trends. We have an agency that supports us, helping to call data available to understand what flavors or what kind of macro drivers we’re starting to see more conversation around.

The second piece is actual global expeditions. We send out various members of our culinary and extended teams into different markets. We have markets all around the world that we identify as sort of dig sites for us. We go in, we learn, we taste, we walk the city. As we experience, we really start to see what’s changing on these menus, what flavors.

We start to see what’s rising around the world through our own experiences, because to only use data that we can find online cuts it short. We’re really bringing the experience and the data together to put this report together and identify our trends and our flavor of the year.

Is there anything else in the works for the rest of the year, or are you working on next year’s forecast?

It’s both. As soon as the big activation wraps up, we’re immediately starting the trendspotting for the next year. There are sustained plans that we keep running through the entire year for flavor forecasts. That includes some social, some owned PR initiatives—really making sure we’re finding the opportunities pushing out flavor forecasts, bringing Aji Amarillo to the conversation and just getting it more visibility. There’s various initiatives: making sure we’ve always got social content running, supporting it through pitching as we see things in editorial calendars, or just have stories to tell. Making sure we extend that beyond the initial launch into really a year-long initiative for us and how we can drive the future.

We are working to bring another product to life by the end of this year. We’re really excited to be able to showcase the versatility of aji amarillo pepper. Tasting is believing, so by creating a secondary product that showcases it really nicely, we’re very excited about that. Stay tuned for what the product will be, but we’re hard at work on that.