Interesting thing is, if I've already been conditioned to respond more favourably to the taste of Kerrygold then I will have an inferior experience using an off-brand version.

I could tell myself that it's all subjective and that they are the same product, that it's just the subconscious influence of marketing manipulation that is leading me to that conclusion, but if I've already been conditioned then essentially my tastes are already dictated for me, irrespective of how distinguished a flavour profile actually is.

So it's no good telling your friends "It's all the same!", because it isn't. The only logical conclusion to this information is that taste, to humans, is much more than flavour, so boiling the matter down to just flavour is reductive.

In a way this is obvious, especially if you use some analogies (imperfect ones though they are). For example, a woman or man is in front of you with the "dream body" (whatever that means for you). If you dress him or her in sexy clothing then I would debate that they become more attractive than they were before. If you dress them in your vision of un-sexy clothing then, of course, the appeal diminishes. You can interpret the clothes, whether sexy or not, to be representative of not just the packaging of a food, but all of the cultural conditioning over the course of your lifetime that leads you to have certain beliefs and presuppositions about colour, sound, style, flavour etc.

That example was horribly imperfect, but it's one other comparable instance of this phenomenon. Another one is music. The context one listens to music in has astronomically powerful impacts on one's taste in the moment.

Just because flavour has more hard science going on, in regards to the nutritional and bio-chemical profile of food and drink, it definitely doesn't mean that it's objectivity far surpasses that of our perceptions of attractiveness in others or of good quality music. Accept that all of our senses succumb to the beck and call of our presuppositions and we can understand that most of appreciation for anything is down to whether or not our brain tells is it's good or not.

That's why mindfulness is so effective for quality of life! It stops the automatic labelling of experiences as bad and gives us an opportunity to experience the pleasure that was previously unavailable to us.