All foods contain a rich mixture of volatile substances, including odor-active aroma compounds that, together with non-volatile taste components, play a key role in imparting flavor. When the food matrix is altered, either by active manipulation, e.g., heat treatment or mechanical processing, or through natural processes, e.g., maturation or fermentation, the composition of its volatile constituents – its volatilome – changes. This shift in the volatilome can be desirable, affording the food a characteristic flavor, or it can be unwanted, resulting in an unpalatable product. Moreover, individual volatile organic compounds, VOCs, can give clues about the status or quality of foods. This aspect can be exploited through chemical analysis of the food, often complemented with sensory evaluations, to characterize the (changing) volatilome and offer insights into the nature of the changes occurring. While the analysis of volatile food constituents by conventional gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, GC-MS, delivers a comprehensive snapshot of the volatilome, direct analysis by real-time analytical technologies, such as direct injection mass spectrometry, DIMS, can track these temporal changes and provide data on the associated dynamic processes. The latter approach can be employed in diverse applications to determine the condition of a food, from food process monitoring to observe and modulate parameters to achieve desirable flavors, e.g., during coffee bean roasting, to shelf-life studies to ascertain the degree of spoilage and aid in use-by date predictions, e.g., storage of milk. This talk will examine how biomarkers within the food volatilome can inform on product quality, and will present technologies and approaches that enable the capture and analysis of these fleeting food constituents.

Catch me if you can – tracking volatile compounds as biomarkers of dynamic food processes using direct analysis

ACS Spring 2022

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