Products and Services
RSS
Aroma & Off-Odor Analysis Services
MOCON, Inc.
MOCON has served a number of industries over the past 10 years with expert analytical services related to aroma and off-odor. We have a full analytical services lab and have over a 90% success ratio in helping resolve aroma and malodor issues in a wide range of materials.
Because trace level compounds are often responsible for off-odors, aroma profiling is a particularly effective method for the resolution of these types of problems. The comparison of the odor profiles of good and bad odor samples will reveal which compounds are causing a product acceptance problem. Trace high impact odors are found in packaging materials and in many food products including such things as beer, high fructose corn syrup and dairy products. The sophisticated AromaTrax® system is designed to effectively discover offending odor compounds and identify them chemically.
Aroma and odor characteristics are critically important to commercial products. For example, trace amounts of 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline are responsible for the wonderful characteristic popcorn aroma of Basmati rice and it must be present at the expected levels for good quality. All other contributing Basmati aromas, some of which negatively affect the quality, are readily detected in a GC/O aroma profile analysis.
Trace level compounds as well as major components contribute to the overall aroma of a product. There is no a priori relationship between concentration and aroma impact. The principal reason for using aroma profiling is that it detects all aromas regardless of their concentrations.
Excellent aroma profiling results are obtained using the AromaTrax® system which has been designed specifically for this type of analysis. Figure 1 below illustrates Larry Nielsen at the instrument performing the aroma profiling. As each aroma/odor is noted at the sniff port, he selects a number of appropriate descriptors from the AromaTrax panel, and defines some overall intensity for that aroma. The AromaTrax software takes that information, and creates an "aromagram" (below), based upon the aroma event width and intensity.
