There is no substitute for the old fashioned taste test, if finding good flavors is the key.
What is weird is that these were not taste bud cells being used. These were kidney cells. It appeared to me that they were being used to verify the presence of trace chemicals that add nuance to flavor, so as to maintain the flavor quality of existing formulas.
Actually the old fashioned taste test is horrible. For one thing it’s notoriously inaccurate (you never know what people have eaten recently that effect how things will taste to them), and for another it tends to be expensive to be hauling people in off the street. The “old fashioned” that actually works is even more expensive because it means contracting with members of a very small group that have established themselves as having “accurate” taste buds which they take good care of (there’s a similar nose group for perfumes), these people have the physiology and the training to be able to detect if you enhanced the cherry 10% as was the goal.
It doesn’t matter where the cells came from, cells is cells and once you do the tweaking they do what you want. What’s important is their ability to have predictable bio-electric reactions so you can see the results of your change. Probably what’s going to happen is the testing company is going to secure a line of cells that came from a non-aborted source (possibly live sampling, possibly cadaver) and the process will continue on the same. They were probably being used two ways, testing tweaks in the chemical process designed to get the same taste for cheaper, and testing tweaks in the chemical process designed to make small changes to the flavor.