Show variants as individual products in search and collection (Warehouse Theme)

Hi,
I’m trying to find a solution to enable my store to show product variants (different flavours) as individual products in search and collections…
Also when doing this, I want to make sure that if a customer searches for a particular flavor, the search only returns the variant that is relevant (not all variants of the product). My description field contains flavour descriptions. So I may need to set search to only return results from titles and product variant meta data.
Is there a way to do this? I feel like the first part should be pretty simple and should really come as a standard e-commerce feature on shopify but doesn’t seem to without an app… second part may be more complicated.
Thanks

*I’ve seen that I can do at least the first part via ‘Smart Search & Product Filter’ app but there is a $40 per month fee to show variants, on top of the regular subscription price. Seems expensive for a new store without any sales yet, for what is essentially a pretty basic feature.

if you link variants to a product it will show all products that have that flavor, you can however separate all variants https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBg0aCnhscE&t=5s

Awesome, thank you :slightly_smiling_face: