Flavors and Fragrances

The flavor of food or substances is the sensory experience they provide. This is often enhanced or created using additives commonly used in products like candy, soft drinks, cakes, biscuits, and snacks. Another type of additive is fragrance, which is made up of natural or synthetic aroma compounds or essential oils that are diluted with substances like propylene glycol, vegetable oil, or mineral oil. Fragrances are used in perfumery, cosmetics, and flavoring of food. Because natural flavor extracts are expensive and hard to find, most commercial flavorants are nature-identical. This means they are chemically synthesized rather than being extracted from source materials but are identical to natural flavors.

Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) has been the gold standard for identifying natural ingredients since the infancy of the technique in the 1960s [1]. Until the 2000s, the quantification needs of the flavor and fragrance (F&F) domain were relatively modest, with few constraints on final accuracy. Only classic quantification techniques were required, such as GC hyphenated to flame ionization detection (FID) and sometimes to MS, focusing on precision rather than accuracy. Liquid chromatography-MS (LC-MS) was not a typical quantification tool. The only well-developed quantitative field in F&F dealt with the naturalness of flavor ingredients by isotopic MS.

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