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Every spring someone asks why we cannot just flavor a product with real strawberries.
A fresh strawberry is 91 percent water. To get something a factory can dose you need 9 to 10 kilos of fruit for one kilo of solids, and most of the aroma goes off with the water. Aroma recovery gets some of it back. The yields are small and what returns tastes cooked.
The chemistry is the harder part. Over 360 volatiles have been identified in strawberry and only 20 to 30 are odor active. Furaneol does most of the work, but smell it on its own and you get caramel. Vanilla has vanillin. Banana has isoamyl acetate. Strawberry has no equivalent.
So it becomes a sourcing decision. FTNF costs a lot, varies batch to batch, and rarely reaches the intensity a brief asks for. WONF fills that gap with other natural materials. And plenty of what sits on shelf is built from natural building blocks and never sees the fruit.
None of those three is wrong. But you have to pick which strawberry you are selling, the one from the field or the one in the flavor, before anyone writes the spec.
