The difference between "natural" and "artificial" flavors is academic at best. Fundamentally, they're the same chemical compounds: the difference is how those compounds are obtained... and the premium you can charge for being "natural". But natural does not mean that the named ingredient was involved at all.
From an older Scientific American article:
Natural coconut flavorings, for example, depend on a
chemical called massoya lactone. Massoya lactone comes
from the bark of the Massoya tree, which grows in
Malaysia. ... This pure natural chemical is identical
to the version made in an organic chemists laboratory,
yet it is much more expensive than the synthetic
alternative.
I would really like artificial flavors to be on sale for consumers. I like yogourth not because some sad chip of fruit sinking in it, but for the proteins and calcium. A drop of some flavor would save me from the sugar spoons added to the fruit flavoured ones. "Natural" yogourth comes without any added sugar.
You can find a limited variety of artificial flavors in unsweetened Kool-Aid packets. You can probably find them for $0.10-$0.25 each at your local grocery store. The downside is that some flavors taste quite dissimilar to the fruits they purport to mimic.
I use them with powdered stevia, and sometimes erythritol or xylitol, to make sugar-free gelatin desserts. Also useful for such purposes are the bottles found near the baking supplies: vanilla, almond, and mint flavors.
Another cheap natural source of low-sugar flavorings can be found in the outer layer of citrus rinds. Lemon, lime, and orange zest adds a bit of [bitter] flavor that is still vaguely fruity.
You can also get powdered malic acid and citric acid in bulk, which will let you make things more tart without making them taste like vinegar.
While it is difficult to find some flavors/fragrances in the grocery store, some essential oils are marketed for cosmetic purposes, for DIY soapmakers or perfumers, but you have to be careful to buy them as food-grade and do your own research into potential toxicity if you ever intend to flavor foods with them.
Thank you for your thourough answer. I'm in Spain, so the options are slightly different. Sacharine + cyclamate (I think it's banned from the USA) tastes much better than anything else.
Cocoa (with no sugar added) and orange peel is my favourite choice for the natural additives.
The artificial flavors are more or less the same. But it's very limited. There's no way to find the complex, more subtle mixes used in branded yogourths, say mango, papaya, kiwi, raisins and the more realistic fruit varieties.
I believe that the lack of choices is caused by the artificial bashing propaganda. People would not buy artificial flavors yet they're consuming them anyway, just because they're conveniently fooled by a few fruit bits in the mix.
I buy artificial flavors all the time, for adding to yogurt or shakes. It comes in little bottles in spice section of any American grocery store. There are various fruit flavors, plus vanilla, almond, cinnamon, root beer and mint.
It is easy to get most of the flavor profile of a natural flavoring using a single pure synthesized molecule. But natural flavors have a host of other "support" molecules that add to the flavor, like adding harmonics to a musical chord.
For every molecule like vanillin, which is a powerful enough component of vanilla that it can often stand in for the whole, there are dozens of molecules that produce variations in flavors when combined. Most humans can't tell the difference in a blind taste test in baked goods.
Furthermore, those support molecules can become easier or harder to taste in the presence of proteins, sugars, or non-aqueous solvents.
So if, for instance, you want to make your artificially flavored vanilla ice cream taste exactly like naturally flavored, the aromatic additive cocktail you must use in addition to the vanillin will need to have a different composition from another food-chemist's concoction for vanilla-flavored sugar cookies.
But even then, you will have to decide what kind of natural vanilla you will choose to mimic, because the country of origin of cured vanilla beans can be discerned by professional tasters and with 100% accuracy by chemical analysis!
It's only moot because it is possible for people to prefer the taste of the artificial flavoring over that of the natural flavor, not because they are indistinguishable from each other.
And as I mentioned elsewhere, compounds purified from genetically engineered microbes can still be called "natural". That seems to be a clear case of pitting the letter of the law against its spirit.
Edit: I mean natural in the vernacular sense, not in regard to whatever is allowed by food labeling laws. That sense is "natural", in scare quotes. Natural coconut flavoring can only come from actual coconuts. "Natural" flavoring can come from the bark of an unrelated tree, beaver butts, engineered microbes, mushrooms, or anything else that could grow in the wild if it were released there. Artificial flavoring comes from a biochemist with a tank of ethylene and a CRC manual.
Unfortunately, "natural" flavoring doesn't at all mean that you're getting those additional flavor molecules, or that they even come from the plant the flavor purports to be from.
See another poster's comment here about natural coconut flavoring, which comes from the bark of a tree and not coconuts. In many, many cases, "natural" flavoring is literally the exact same compound as "artificial" flavoring, just extracted from a source in nature.
From an older Scientific American article:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-differ...