Taste organoids in food science: functional maturation, dietary remodelling, and biological taste evaluation

Taste is the primary interface for chemical sensing and nutritional decision making, shaping food choice, feeding behaviour, and metabolic homeostasis. In food science, taste has become an important biological indicator for evaluating flavour active compounds and diet related responses, yet current models still struggle to combine physiological relevance, mechanistic interpretability, and standardized functional assessment. This review summarizes the biological basis of taste organoid construction, highlights key determinants of functional maturation, and discusses their emerging applications in long term dietary remodelling and biological taste evaluation, particularly flavour peptide screening. Taste organoids can partially reconstruct native taste epithelium and support dynamic functional assays, providing a controllable system for investigating selected taste-active substances and for exploring potential mechanisms of dietary adaptation. However, their wider application remains limited by insufficient functional maturity, limited standardization, and poor compatibility with high throughput workflows. Future efforts should establish reproducible culture systems, unified maturity criteria, and engineered analytical platforms before taste organoids can be broadly applied to biological taste and functional food-related evaluation.