Do Babies Have Taste Buds and When Do They Develop?

Babies are born with a fully functional sense of taste and, in fact, start developing taste buds long before birth. The structures that allow taste perception begin forming during the first trimester of pregnancy, and by around week 14 or 15 of gestation, most taste pores on the tongue are already in place. Newborns actually arrive with roughly 10,000 taste buds spread more widely across the mouth than an adult’s, making them surprisingly sensitive tasters from the moment they take their first breath.

How Taste Buds Form in the Womb

Taste bud development follows a fairly brisk timeline. Nerve fibers begin reaching toward the surface of the tongue between the sixth and seventh week after conception. By the eighth week, those nerves have pushed through the tissue and started forming connections with early taste cells. Around the twelfth week, more specialized cell types appear, including cells that will eventually detect sour tastes and cells involved in sensing sweet, bitter, and umami flavors. The taste pores themselves, the tiny openings on the tongue’s surface where saliva carries dissolved chemicals to receptor cells, mostly develop by the fourteenth to fifteenth week.¹

What’s striking about this timeline is how early the hardware is in place relative to when a baby is actually born. A fetus at 15 weeks still has roughly 25 weeks of development ahead, yet taste structures are already wired up and beginning to function. The nerve connections between taste cells and the brain reach their peak density around weeks 12 to 13, well into the first trimester.¹ That said, having the structures in place doesn’t mean they work at full adult capacity right away. Research has noted that while the anatomy develops early, adult-level function and adult-sized taste structures take longer to mature.²

Tasting Flavors Before Birth

Because the fetus constantly swallows amniotic fluid, and because that fluid picks up chemical traces of whatever the mother eats, babies get their first flavor experiences months before they eat any food. Studies have shown that maternal diet genuinely changes the chemical composition of amniotic fluid. In one experiment, pregnant women who swallowed garlic capsules about 45 minutes before an amniocentesis procedure produced amniotic fluid that a panel of adults could reliably identify as smelling like garlic compared with fluid from women who took placebo capsules.³

More recently, researchers used ultrasound imaging to show that fetuses don’t just passively encounter these flavors; they react to them. Between 32 and 36 weeks of gestation, fetuses whose mothers had consumed a carrot-flavored capsule were more likely to make facial movements associated with smiling and laughter. Fetuses exposed to kale, on the other hand, more frequently showed facial movements linked to crying and lip pressing.⁴ These weren’t subtle statistical patterns buried in noise. The differences between the carrot and kale groups were clear enough to be measured frame by frame on ultrasound. Fetuses, it seems, already have opinions about vegetables.

What Newborns Can Taste Right Away

Babies don’t arrive as blank slates when it comes to taste. They come pre-loaded with strong preferences that appear to be hardwired. Newborns consistently show positive responses to sweet and negative responses to bitter flavors.⁵ The preference for sweet is thought to have evolved because sweetness typically signals energy-dense, calorie-rich foods, while bitterness often flags potentially toxic plants. For an organism that can’t read labels or ask questions about what it’s eating, these built-in preferences serve as a rough safety guide.⁶

Researchers have documented these reactions in striking detail. In a study of infants between five and eight weeks old, facial muscle activity was recorded while the babies tasted different solutions. Almost all of the infants, close to 100%, showed measurable facial responses to the unpleasant tastes of quinine (bitter) and citric acid (sour), while about 80% responded to sucrose (sweet).⁷ The reactions weren’t identical across tastes. Multiple facial muscle regions fired simultaneously but in different patterns depending on whether the flavor was pleasant or unpleasant, suggesting the discrimination is real and not just a generic startle response.

Umami, the savory taste associated with protein-rich foods, is another flavor newborns seem to detect. Infant studies have found that adding a umami compound to soup makes it preferred over soup alone, even though the compound dissolved in plain water isn’t preferred over water by itself.⁸ In other words, babies seem to appreciate umami in the same contextual way adults do: it enhances food rather than tasting good on its own. The liking for sweet, salty, and umami flavors alongside a dislike for bitter appears to be a basic part of human sensory wiring from the start.⁹

Salt Preference Doesn’t Show Up Immediately

One interesting exception to the “born with it” pattern is salt. Unlike sweetness, which newborns respond to right away, salt preference takes a few months to emerge. Infants around three to four months old begin showing a detectable preference for salty solutions over plain water, and this appears to be an unlearned biological response rather than something shaped by early feeding.¹⁰ Before that age, babies seem indifferent to or even mildly averse to salty solutions.

Why the delay? The receptor systems and neural pathways involved in detecting salt appear to mature on a slightly different schedule than those for sweet and bitter. This is worth knowing for parents, because it means the absence of a salt response in a very young infant doesn’t signal anything wrong. It’s simply a taste channel that comes online a bit later than the others.

How Breast Milk Carries the Mother’s Diet

The flavor education that begins with amniotic fluid continues after birth through breast milk. A systematic review found moderate evidence that flavors from the maternal diet, including garlic, carrot, mint, anise, caraway, and eucalyptus, transfer into breast milk in a time-dependent way.¹¹ The flavor profile of breast milk isn’t static; it shifts from feeding to feeding based on what the mother has recently eaten.¹²

This gives breastfed babies a continuously changing palette of tastes, which is thought to help prepare them for the transition to solid foods. Each nursing session becomes a small preview of the household diet. A mother who regularly eats a diverse diet introduces her infant to a wider range of flavor compounds, and evidence suggests these early experiences may shape food preferences later on.¹³ Exposure to flavor variety during pregnancy and breastfeeding may improve dietary outcomes down the line, although the degree of flavor transfer varies between individuals.¹⁴

Formula-Fed Babies Get a Different Flavor Story

Formula-fed infants have a notably different early taste experience because formula has a more consistent, less varied flavor than breast milk. But the type of formula matters more than people might expect. Infants fed hydrolyzed casein formulas, which have a distinctly bitter and savory taste due to broken-down proteins, develop measurably different taste responses compared with those fed standard milk-based formulas. In studies of babies not yet eating table foods, hydrolyzed-formula-fed infants ate more of savory, bitter, and sour-tasting cereals and showed fewer facial expressions of distaste while eating them.¹⁵

The effects persist for years. Children who had been fed hydrolyzed protein formulas as infants were more likely to prefer sour-flavored juices and less likely to grimace during taste tests when evaluated several years after they had stopped drinking formula. Children who had been fed soy-based formulas showed a preference for bitter-flavored apple juice. Mothers of children in both the hydrolyzed and soy formula groups also reported that their children were more likely to enjoy broccoli compared with children who had been on standard milk formulas.¹⁶ The takeaway is that what tastes “normal” to a young infant calibrates their palate in ways that persist well beyond the bottle stage.

There’s a nuance worth noting, though. Hydrolyzed-formula infants who were later introduced to vegetables consumed less broccoli and cauliflower relative to carrots compared with milk-formula infants, and their mothers were about twice as likely to report that their baby didn’t enjoy the brassica vegetables.¹⁷ This is consistent with a kind of flavor-specific satiety: if a baby has already been flooded with bitter and savory notes from its formula, it may be less enthusiastic about those same notes showing up in vegetables. Early taste experience isn’t just about more exposure equals more acceptance. Context and variety seem to matter.

Why Some Babies Reject Bitter Foods More Than Others

Not all babies experience bitterness with the same intensity. A gene called TAS2R38 encodes a taste receptor that detects bitter chemicals found in certain vegetables, and common variations in this gene change how strongly a person perceives that bitterness. Some people are strong bitter tasters, some are intermediate, and some barely detect the bitterness at all. These differences are present from infancy and have measurable effects on feeding behavior. In one study, about 31% of infants genetically insensitive to the relevant bitter compound finished a whole complementary meal on their first attempt, compared with only 13% of bitter-sensitive infants.¹⁸ The difference held regardless of whether the baby was breastfed or what specific foods were in the meal.

In adults, the amount of TAS2R38 receptor protein expressed in taste cells directly correlates with how bitter someone rates foods like broccoli juice and substances like quinine.¹⁹ And this genetic predisposition doesn’t just affect raw perception; it also predicts how people respond to dietary advice. In a community nutrition intervention, participants who were genetically insensitive to bitterness increased their vegetable consumption the most, while strong bitter tasters in a minimal-intervention group actually decreased theirs.²⁰

For parents, this means that a baby who consistently rejects green vegetables may not be “picky” in a behavioral sense. They may literally be tasting something more intense than you are. Understanding that there’s a genetic component can help reframe the situation: it’s not defiance, it’s biology. Repeated gentle exposure and pairing bitter vegetables with flavors the baby already enjoys tend to be more productive strategies than simply insisting.

Premature Babies and Taste

Because taste structures develop so early in pregnancy, even premature infants can detect flavors. In a study of preterm babies with an average gestational age of about 35 and a half weeks who had never been fed by mouth (they received all nutrition through a gastric tube), seven out of eight showed a stronger sucking response to glucose solution than to plain water from the very first trial.²¹ The sucking response to glucose also increased with repeated exposure, while the response to water stayed flat. The researchers concluded that the ability to distinguish sweet from non-sweet and a preference for sweetness are present even without any prior oral feeding experience, pointing to a genetic basis.

That said, premature infants can face challenges with taste and feeding that full-term babies don’t. The immaturity of their taste buds and sensory pathways can lead to delayed maturation of taste perception and altered feeding behaviors.²² For babies born very early, the period of tube feeding means they miss out on the normal oral flavor experiences that full-term infants accumulate in the final weeks of pregnancy and during early breastfeeding. Clinicians working with premature infants sometimes consider small amounts of non-nutritive oral stimulation with breast milk to help bridge this gap, though practices vary across hospitals.

Taste Buds Outside the Tongue

When most people picture taste buds, they imagine the tongue. But babies, and adults for that matter, have taste receptors in places that might seem surprising. Researchers studying human tissue from the arytenoid region of the larynx (the cartilage structure near the vocal cords) found many taste buds containing cells that detect bitter, sweet, and umami flavors, along with acid-responsive cells.²³ These taste buds are innervated by nerve fibers, meaning they’re functional sensory equipment, not developmental leftovers.

In infants, having taste receptors near the airway entrance is thought to serve a protective role. If food or liquid starts heading toward the lungs rather than the stomach, bitter or sour receptors in the larynx can trigger reflexive swallowing or coughing to redirect the material. Newborns have about 10,000 taste buds distributed more broadly across the mouth and throat than adults do.²⁴ Over time, many of the taste buds on the palate, inner cheeks, and throat diminish, concentrating taste perception more on the tongue as the child grows. But in those first months and years, the wider distribution means that a baby’s entire oral cavity is participating in taste in a way that yours no longer does.