In 1725, the French explorer Reynaud Des Marchais was astounded to find that the locals regularly consumed the berry to improve the taste of bland or sour breads, but until the small explosion of research into the biological mechanisms at work at the protein level over the past decade, we didn’t really understand why.

The surface of your tongue is covered by a multitude of different receptors to detect tastes from sweet to umami. Just like sugar and artificial sweeteners like aspartame, the miraculin in the berry binds to your sweet taste receptors, but far more strongly.

The acid present in sour foods sparks a chemical reaction that causes miraculin to temporarily distort the shape of these taste receptors, enhancing them and making them so sensitive that the powerful sweet signals they are sending to your brain completely drown out the sour ones.

So far, miracle fruit has largely been used as something of a fine-dining gimmick at high-end restaurants from New York to Tokyo. Customers eat the berry and for the next hour, enjoy a “flavor-tripping” experience as sour turns to sweet in their mouths until the miraculin dislodges from their tongues.

So consuming the berry before you eat a sugar-free dessert will provide you with your ‘sweet fix’ but many believe that the full potential of miraculin has yet to be explored. Cantu has spent the past eight years working on a way to actually integrate the berry powder into foods so it has the same effect, starting with a doughnut.

However, this isn’t as easy as it might seem. Both refrigerating and heating miraculin causes the protein to activate, so its taste-twisting properties are sapped long before you sample the food. Cantu’s task has been to try and create a heat-stable form of miraculin, in order to cook with it.

With this new version of the protein, the effect only lasts for as long as it takes you to finish your doughnut.

“It’s the same reaction, but this time it happens in thousandths of a second,” he explains. “The miraculin will only latch onto your taste receptors for a small amount of time, just enough for you to enjoy the food that’s in your mouth.”

But if you’re expecting to be able to buy miraculin flavored doughnuts on the high street anytime soon, then think again.

The idea of introducing the miracle berry into food as a sugar replacement was actually first conceived almost 50 years ago by an entrepreneur called Robert Harvey who began to create a range of sugar-free products coated with the berry extract. Initially, his company Miralin appeared destined for instant success. In a poll in which schoolchildren were asked to choose between a sugary food and one of Harvey’s new treats, they voted overwhelmingly in favor of the latter.

However, things were about to change rapidly. The sequence of events which ensued would not look out of place in a Hollywood film. Harvey began to suspect that he was being followed on the way home from work; then one night in the summer of 1974, he reported that his office had been raided and his files stolen.